RTC train plan is really about revenue

The RTC is pushing a $4.2 billion commuter train through peaceful neighborhoods — displacing families, cutting across backyards, and insisting on the destruction of homes that can’t be moved or replaced.

They call it “green,” but this isn’t about riders — it’s about revenue. What they’re building is industrial infrastructure: overhead wires, steel fencing, 24/7 electrified lines, and horn blasts through foggy neighborhoods. This isn’t progress — it’s lifestyle disruption dressed as policy.

I’ve seen this playbook before. When a 236-home development was proposed in northern Scotts Valley, I helped stop it. I delivered the ballots. We didn’t get hillside blight — we got a nature preserve and a high school.

That’s what real public benefit looks like.

We know a profiteering scam when it blows into town. And we know how to stop one.

— Damon Meyer, Santa Cruz

Juneteenth: Another Trump attack on DEI

How is a celebration on the ending of slavery, one of the most heinous periods in our American history, thrown aside because it is considered DEI? Funding cuts and corporations withdrawing support and pulling back from anything considered DEI have impacted communities’ abilities to have events acknowledging Juneteenth, which is a federal holiday.

It is not the only victim of Trump’s attack on anything he considers DEI. The military itself, at his direction has been purged. It is sadly ironic that Trump’s birthday parade, which was originally supposed to be an event honoring the birth of the U.S. Army, had no trouble getting corporate sponsors. A military parade should never walk hand in hand with such a naked display of pay for play that marks Trump’s presidency.

He continues to use his presidential eraser to remake America into what he thinks it should be and to make the military his personal army. Scary!

— Christine DeLapp, Aptos

Cartoon focused on car, not people targeted by ICE

Your June 12 editorial cartoon depicting a burnt car in LA was unfortunate. Sure, burning a car isn’t great. But a car is just a thing, it can be replaced. Families torn apart may be separated for the rest of their lives, traumatized for generations.

I had a friend in Santa Cruz who worked for a local restaurant. Years ago he was pulled over by ICE and arrested in front of his girlfriend and little daughter. His crime? Getting up before dawn every morning to bus dishes all day. His daughter, now a young adult, hasn’t seen him in person since.

Multiply that story by hundreds of thousands. There’s the real violence.

— Scotty Brookie, Santa Cruz

Correction: Nonviolent resisters are targeted

Ed. note: This Letter to the Editor is being republished due to editing errors when it first appeared.

The Guest Commentary, “Local GOP calls for end to intimidation aimed at Trump supporters,” in the June 6 edition of the Sentinel, paints Republicans as victims in a culture war. My truth? As a 61-year-old female member of Indivisible Santa Cruz County who shows up to nonviolently protest by holding a sign, I have many times been flipped off, had diesel exhaust blown onto my group of fellow older women and — almost every time I’m out there — had drivers scream obscenities or yell DONALD TRUMP while cocking their fingers at me as if they would shoot me if they had a gun. Yet, these actions are nothing compared to the discrimination and attacks being suffered by our racial minority, LGBTQIA2+ and immigrant brothers and sisters — so I will continue to show up for nonviolent protests.

Every Republican — which evidenced by their membership in today’s MAGA-powered GOP — supports the current fascist, racist, misogynist, un-American administration — must be nonviolently resisted every minute of every day until the despicable administration has vacated our White House. Join us!

— Karen Menehan, Santa Cruz

‘No Kings’ organizers ignored Trump war crimes

“No Kings Day” organizers successfully kept the Oval Office puppet in their crosshairs — not his masters. Trump is savagely demonized for belatedly enforcing legitimate immigration laws.

Meanwhile … Trump green-lights Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and green-lights yet another full-blown Zionist war (against Iran).

Congratulations, “No Kings” organizers, for carefully ignoring Trump’s war crimes.

— Pat Kittle, Santa Cruz