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Readers write: tough on crime laws; innovation and climate; cursive writing

Letters to the editor for the March 28, 2016 weekly magazine.

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Gerald Herbert/AP
Audience members listen as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign event at the Williamsburg County Recreation Center in Kingstree, S.C., on Thursday.

Tough on crime met a need
Congratulations for the wonderful reporting in the March 14 online article “Why many black voters don’t blame Hillary for tough-on-crime laws” (CSMonitor.com). Younger voters are not familiar with recent history, and are not aware of the very high crime rate in the United States during the late 1980s and early ’90s, occurring especially among minority races.

I was witness to and a victim of crime during this period. I was a victim of personal theft and my apartment was robbed. My friend was physically assaulted. My friends and I are all African-Americans. The smaller as well as the larger community had reached an end to ways and means to reduce crime. At that time the three-strikes law was supported by a vast majority – black and white.

Hillary Clinton has been around a long time, which necessarily means she has grown and changed through the years. How unfair to judge her for the past. It is the present that counts.
Jackie Reid
Tujunga, Calif.

Don’t forget climate in innovation
The March 14 Monitor’s View “Advice for a world in search of innovation, not doomsayers” seemed to have an uplifting message. It painted a hopeful future for our children with high hopes that our economy will improve lives as it continues innovating and increasing productivity. Too bad it left out five very important words: if we address climate change.
Kathleen A. Brazaitis
Stevens Point, Wis.

Sign of the times
The March 7 Home Forum essay, “In praise of cursive writing,” on the demise of cursive writing could possibly be extrapolated into our broader society. In the current technological culture, in which people communicate in impersonal ways and face-to-face discussion is fading, one could say that this approach to the exchange of ideas doesn’t impart the same warmth as a thoughtful, handwritten note.
Joan Rossano
Alvin, Texas

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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