LETTERS: Gov. Rauner has done nothing for Illinois

Gov. Bruce Rauner is incompetent. He’s bringing up the Trump “fake news” ploy. This man has done nothing for Illinois except try to give himself a tax break and not fund the safety-net programs that keep a democracy healthy.

Claiming that WBEZ is “fake news” means that he is dishonest and lies. He was told that they stop interviewing the sitting governor because of the campaign season. He knew that but chose to show us he’s a liar, claiming Trump’s favorite lie: “fake news.” Liars have no morality and are attempting to self-serve, allowing democracy to die in the blackness of the lie. However, the truth always comes out and the lies ultimately damage the liar, sooner or later.

Melanie Lee, Lake View

Avoids the facts

“Putin calls Trump’s national security strategy ‘aggressive,’ ” (Dec. 24) avoids relevant facts and historical context and gives credence, suggesting agreement, with Vladimir Putin that the United States and NATO are the “aggressors.”

NATO’s principal reason for existence is defense. Russia took over Belarus. At this time Russia has troops in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine without the consent of the legitimate governments in those countries. Russia has threatened to place nuclear-capable missiles in Kaliningard and Crimea. There is permanent Russian deployment all along Russia’s western borders. Those facts point to the real aggressor.

Joseph W. Zurawski, Park Ridge

Informative column

Rich Miller’s Sunday column was well-written and informative.

Unfortunately, based on his observations of all the parties involved, I see little, if any, chance of solutions for the financial chaos facing our city and state.

John Agazim, Highland Park

Resist political evil

In 1938 Chairman Mao said, “Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. … All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army.”

Recently new details have emerged about a massacre by “the chief component of state power” in China of 1989 of thousands of unarmed civilian protesters, many of them students. According to SBS, an Australian television news source, “At least 10,000 people were killed in the Chinese army’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989, according to a newly released British diplomatic cable that recounts the bloodshed in gruesome detail. The document, made public more than 28 years after the event, describes injured girls being bayoneted, bodies being ground up by armored vehicles and human remains being flushed into the sewers.”

What Chairman Mao and all tyrants and dictators fail to grasp is that political power and sovereignty is derived from the people, not by a small and determined but frightened armed minority. People of conscience, people of good will, people who resist evil nonviolently may be mowed down, but ultimately their powerful messages live on, and ultimately topples tyranny. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy lost their lives to assassins who wielded “the barrel of a gun,” but ultimately they were not silenced.

Each of us must do what we can to resist political evil wherever it is found. For those of us who are blessed to live in nations where political transitions are non-violent and accomplished by electoral means, we must never grow weary or abdicate the power of the ballot box. We must be patient. We must organize. We must always have hope and belief in the basic goodness of most men and women. We must strive to control our destinies peacefully while we can do so without having to be brave, to have to purchase our freedom and the freedom of others by staring down those using “the barrel of a gun.”

Andrey Filipowicz, Loop

Inaccurate editorial

This letter is in response to your editorial in today’s edition “Immigrants, refugees, the poor and the birth of Jesus.”

You write, “When we say Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus were like refugees or immigrants or homeless people, turned away from the inn, we know people have said that for centuries”; then you relate stories of “the impoverished people who slip over the border form Mexico, illegally and unwelcomed” and “the homeless men and women who sleep in tents below Lake Shore Drive.”

A stirring visual, but an inaccurate one, that I have usually seen related by those who normally dismiss Scripture and those who believe it except when they can use it to promote their own agendas regardless of the veracity or context.

When Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem, they were not “slipping over the border” in disobedience of the law, they were traveling there to fully comply with the law, which required citizens of the Roman empire to return to the familial home to register with the Census. As far as the equation with the homeless, would you extend a similarly pious picture for business travelers finding themselves victims of an overbooking at a national convention? That image is far more accurate with the events described in the Gospels, but far less emotionally and politically evocative.

The Wise Men were strangers, but they too were in compliance with the laws, arriving in Jerusalem and speaking with King Herod before traveling to Bethlehem. And the Scripture states they came to visit, not to relocate, unlike the refugees you compare them to.

And when Jesus spoke of feeding the hungry and clothing the poor, He instructed us to do this as a personal sacrifice and to understand and build fellowship with others. He did not call for the Roman Empire to establish a new bureaucracy and take gold and silver at the point of a spear to alleviate this duty, but the false prophets promoting agendas often equate the two.

Douglas Winston, Waukegan