The morning after the historic event of the first woman presidential candidate nominated by a major political The Recorder ran a little story, bottom of the fold, along with a photo of her husband.
I don’t get it.
It’s not like there is a shortage of recent photographs of Secretary (and former Senator) Hillary Clinton. Maybe it is because most newspapers are run by men, and they didn’t think it was that big of a deal.
Perhaps they didn’t think through the “optics” of running a top of the fold article about Bernie Sanders supporters, featuring our (male) state rep. as delegate, the morning after Secretary Hillary Clinton became the official Democratic Nominee for president.
Maybe they know it is a big deal but The Recorder was waiting for Secretary Clinton to speak, in order to feature photos of her accepting the nomination. Maybe they are waiting for the convention to end.
Well, guess what? We have been waiting, too.
We have compliantly waited, with raised hands, while the boys called out in class. We politely waited in line while boys cut for lunch, for art supplies, for team spots in PE.
We still wait to be promoted or to be offered raises, instead of asking, so we don’t appear too pushy at work. We wait while we are interrupted in meetings, even by subordinates. We waited for research on heart disease to include information on women’s bodies. We wait for solutions while more and more elderly women live in poverty.
We have been waiting for the fourth or fifth Clinton “scandal” witch-hunt to end. We have been waiting for the Democrats to finish the primary season, during which Clinton was ahead. The. Entire. Time.
We have been waiting for fellow Democrats and were OK with the words “presumptive nominee,” even as the pledged-delegate math was astronomically against any other outcome.
We are still waiting for the country to stop saying that people are voting for her “just because she’s a woman,” even though her resume is longer and has more depth and substance than any presidential candidate in the history of the United States.
And some of us we have been waiting since we were little girls, hands on our hearts, to see a person like us get this close to becoming the leader of the free world.
But by all means wait.
Danielle
Letourneau-Therrien
Greenfield
Reconsider copycat weapons
An open letter to Stephen Kulik and Susannah Whipps Lee:
Dear Steve and Susannah,
I was very concerned to read in Wednesday’s Recorder that you, along with a number of other legislators, were trying to stand in the way of Attorney General Maura Healey’s attempt to enforce the 1998 assault weapons ban by “focusing on what she called ‘copycat’ versions of duplicates of firearms banned under that law.”
This seems to me to be the job of the Attorney Gene ral, to make sure the laws of the commonwealth are enforced. Although the letter describes these directives as “new directions,” Attorney General Healey’s statement in the paper says that she is simply enforcing the law as it is written.
If assault weapons are banned, then surely it makes sense that copycat assault weapons should be banned, also, and the fact that no pointed that the letter signed that Ms. Healey is attempting to enforce “a whole new law that unfairly infringes on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners in Massachusetts.” How can enforcing a law outlawing copy cat assault weapons infringe on someone’s “Second Amendment rights?”
Only in a world where gun owners feel that any kind of gun control infringes on their rights would this be true. It is Ms. Healey’s job to enforce the laws of the Commonwealth. Let her do that job.
There should be no place in a civilized society for the average person to be able to buy assault weapons — copycat or not.
Anthony Palmieri
Mary-Ann DeVita Palmieri
New Salem