Southerners pray over everything
To critics of praying before a football game: You live in the South! We pray over food, sports events, sick people and crops. I remember when the governor prayed for rain during the drought. Praying is multigenerational. There is no racial line. If anything, it brings us closer, knowing that something greater than ourselves is in charge. If you don’t want to pray, no one is going to criticize you or write about you in the newspaper. About the baptism on the football field, I know no one forced this person to be baptized. People are baptized anywhere, not just a church. Just try to respect what is deep in the hearts of Southerners.
STEPHANIE RUBY, MONROE
Give context to confederacy
Two pieces in Sept. 6’s AJC — (“Confederate Symbols,” News, and George Will’s “Out with ‘Redskins’ and everything else offensive,” Opinion) perfectly balanced the question of what to do with all those Confederate symbols in the Capitol and on its grounds. Some want removal of all Confederate symbolism, which results in another kind of whitewashing of that history. Will’s column presents the lunacy of removing all things offensive. Those artifacts represent the history of our state and national families. All families have members who are honorable and forgotten, and some who aren’t honorable and are not forgotten. And, even the most honorable person has some stupid incident that someone could find offensive.
Perhaps the best solution for everything at the state capitol is the General Assembly actually providing the funding to open the long-proposed state history museum to “de-clutter” the Capitol. Then, most everything on display inside the Capitol can be presented in its historical context. Then, politicians can just fight over what said museum’s items are on permanent versus temporary display under the Gold Dome versus more important issues, such as the state tax code.
DAVID STEWART, SMYRNA
Book festival unites communities
While at the AJC Decatur Book Festival, I was surrounded by a captivating smorgasbord of stalls filled with books of all kinds: from poetry to prose, fiction to non-fiction, and even to religious texts.
I was particularly blown away by the variety of faith systems there promoting interfaith dialogue. I encountered set-ups by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike.
As a volunteer at the stall set up by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, whose motto is “Love for All, Hatred for None,” I was elated to see this. We are passionate about promoting this slogan through interfaith conversations and spreading a message of peace. This book fair helped me see potential for a more peaceful world. Who says that world peace can’t start from our dialogues right here in Atlanta?
NAJIA HUMAYUN, TUNNEL HILL
Liberal media should lift head from sand
One solution to the problem of police brutality highlighted by E.J. Dionne Jr (“Healing nation’s wounds requires real commitment,” Opinion, Sept. 4) would be for the media to objectively report the news. If that were the case, the headlines for Ferguson might have read: “Heroic police officer survives violent attack by dangerous street criminal” and “Impotent politicians stand by and do nothing as violent mob destroys poor neighborhood.” Too often, a complicit press misrepresents the facts, unwittingly giving legitimacy to fringe groups of lawless criminals like Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street. As far as the racial element, it takes very little research indeed to discover that police brutality is “equal opportunity.” Apparently that is research Dionne, in his search for “real commitment,” could not be bothered with.
JEFF BEAMER, ATLANTA
