OPINION: Santa Fe Plaza isn’t the same without its historic obelisk

Santa Fe Plaza isn’t the same without its historic obelisk

Johny Walker from Rio Rancho came up with a reasonable and thoughtful solution to the dilemma of the obelisk in his “Plaza obelisk should be reinstalled as testament to the folly of war” (Oct. 21 Journal).

I miss the obelisk. It was beautiful and it was unique. It was a piece of New Mexico.

After 60 years of looking at it whenever I visited Santa Fe, I now find it difficult to walk through the plaza. The few people who destroyed it had no right to make that decision for all of us.

I am with Johny Walker: restore the iconic monument, leaving off any of the offensive details, I think there was only one.

The Santa Fe Plaza isn’t the same plaza without it.

ELIZABETH DOYLE

Sandia Park

Toulouse Oliver tried to protect voters’ safety

The Sept. 8 Sunday Journal editorial, “NM leaders should learn valuable lesson from voter information suppression ruling” deliberately painting N.M. Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver as politically biased because she wanted to protect voter information is simplistic.

Yes, the court ruled against N.M. for not allowing the Voter Reference Foundation to post information on all registered voters online. But Toulouse Oliver had good reasons: Posting the name, address, party affiliation, sex, age and voting history of all 1.3 million registered voters on the internet for all to see can be dangerous. Just ask the elected officials whose homes were fired upon, or those voters who have been harassed by angry neighbors …

The lawful use of voter data by candidates, parties or academics to target mailings or compile reports is far different from putting your address out on the internet so bullies can repeatedly send police to your house, or scammers and salespeople can freely accost senior citizens at their doors.

Toulouse Oliver should not be slammed for trying to protect voters, that’s her primary job as secretary of state.

The key is to blend safety, efficiency, access and transparency into a system of election administration that inspires confidence and encourages voters to participate. Far from being a biased, discriminatory political operative, as the Journal, and the judge, would have you believe, Toulouse Oliver’s work resulted in a No.1 national rating for election administration in 2024 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s annual Election Performance Index.

I’m glad she’s protecting voters like me.

SHANNON KUNKEL

Albuquerque

Dropped charges encourage more criminal behavior

Forty-thousand dollars in damage done to UNM property by protesters. That’s $40,000 of hard-earned taxpayer money down the drain because of the criminal actions of a person who does not know if they/them are male or female.

I do appreciate the Journal informing me that the individual uses the pronoun they/them. I’ll never understand this nonsense.

Now to the larger issue of what happened to the protesters.

From the Oct. 7 article, not much of anything, they basically walked after being arrested on numerous charges. Why? UNM allowed these protests to go on and took late action to quell them.

Perhaps they failed to timely curtail these crimes in the name of “academic freedom,” reminds me of the late 60s, early 70s and the Vietnam issue.

Why do the police, DA and the courts not move more aggressively against these types of criminal behaviors? Why do they cower and not clamp down on crime in general and give us a safe place to and raise our children and grandchildren?

I, for one, among a vast majority of our citizens, are fed up with widespread, unrelenting crime brought in part by wokeness.

DAVID GILMORE

Albuquerque

Journal has preference for GOP presidential candidates

After living in Albuquerque for almost 45 years and being well aware of the Journal’s conservative leaning, I became curious as to when the paper last endorsed a Democratic presidential nominee.

I spent several hours at the Downtown library and was able to track the endorsements as far back as 1952. And in all that time, 72 years and 18 elections, the total number of endorsements the Albuquerque Journal has given to the Democrat was: zero.

That’s right, this newspaper has never once considered the Democratic Party’s candidate to be preferable to the Republican.

To be fair, on three occasions the Journal has considered the race to be a toss-up. In 1964, Johnson vs. Goldwater; 2016, Trump vs. Clinton; and 2020, Trump vs. Biden; the paper has told its readers it could not decide and for them to make up their own minds.

I find it doubtful that anything will change this year.

MARK MARAVETZ

Albuquerque

NM needs to expand equitable dental care

As faculty at Santa Fe Community College in the dental field I have noticed a vast discrepancy in access to oral health care in the state of New Mexico for individuals who are low income and live in rural communities, which severely lack dental offices and must travel long distances to get any type of care.

Of course this is nothing new, but I propose that the state of New Mexico should incentivize all dental offices to allow all forms of dental insurances, including Medicare and Medicaid, to be accepted in their practices. If all dental offices accepted all patients, regardless of their socioeconomic status, there would be more equitable dental care for all New Mexicans.

Most practices currently only accept patients who are paying out of pocket or have private insurance, which is only serving the middle class and the wealthy citizens of this state. The few offices that do accept low-income individuals or Medicaid and Medicare are left having to wait long periods of time just to be seen for any dental care, including emergency visits.

We need to take care of all New Mexicans and give them the opportunity to receive appropriate oral care just like any human being deserves.

KARLA CATANACH

Santa Fe