Letters to the editor for May 12

Cutting art and music in public schools?

I am first an historian. I am second a politically progressive woman. I am third of a generation who grew up in public school systems where music and arts education in K-12 made it possible for youth to find community in class rooms.

The recent “news” about arts and music education being described as “white supremacist” is either wrong and taken out of context, or proof that “woke” culture neophytes do not know history.

When any group of elected officials discount — or refuse to fund — art and music education for all youth, they refuse to support youth who may not find intellectual and supportive education elsewhere.

I found community in art and music classes in grade school, junior high and high school. In high school symphony band and drama I met and befriended youth who were socially, ethnically, and physically different from me.

Whoever described music and art education as white supremacist oppression at work in Olympia schools — Shame on you!

There is nothing more important than education that exposes students to history, arts, music and science. Ideas are more important than a cathedral. Ideas are meant to be explored. Art and music education helps students understand the history of the society in which they live.

That someone used white supremacy to excuse de-funding the arts in K-12 has gone viral. This progressive librarian and historian, who is 60 years old, says shame on you!

Find me. It won’t be hard. Let’s talk.

Liza Rognas, Olympia

What can we do?

These days it is tough to live as a conscientious citizen who reads and thinks. The blatant Trumpish pranks and those of Donald Trump’s followers had somewhat subsided after Joe Biden became president — a good Democratic President, in my view, one of those much-maligned career politicians who had gained valuable information from decades-long worldwide experiences. One with empathy, caring, ethical backbone and overall good health.

But the frame of U.S. politics was laid decades ago with its deplorable deliberate inequities on every level. That is to say that what 21st century Republicans now spew out as “conspiracy theories” they themselves use fervently by blaming progressive Democrats.

The once sneaky, now overt merger of state and corporate power, corrupted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s approved cynical ”Citizens United” ruling rapidly drowns out Democratic ways the U.S. flaunts as realities while systematically undermining them. The little earners’ modest contributions are drops in the oceans of millionaires and billionaires.

Roads and bridges once built to transport goods for all now face neglect by the super wealthy smug with their own airplanes and yachts. Yet some investing people helped corporations expand infinitely with their mutual greed at the expense of our environment.

Left-winger activists aware of the above-stated shenanigans who protest within their First Amendment rights to free speech become incarcerated in some U.S. states as “domestic terrorists.”

What can we do to change all this?

Helga Teska, Olympia

Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor compromised

The Olympian failed to expose the story of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor who accepted nearly $2 million from Penguin Random House in a book deal and then went on to sit in judgment of a copyright case involving Penguin Random House.

Yet, you ran a story on Justice Clarence Thomas, who allowed his friend, Harlan Crow, to pay the tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew. At no time did Thomas ever preside over a case involving his friend Crow. The Olympian paints Thomas in a negative light who uplifts the education of a young man, only because Crow identifies with the GOP.

James Symmonds, Olympia