Re: “Voters should make better election choices,” John Berry, Dec. 14.
When I saw John Berry’s recent commentary arguing that voters should make better election choices, I looked forward to reading his pearls of wisdom.
But then I read his claim that Redlands Unified School District board candidate Erin Stepien might have won if Victoria Ogunrinu had not run. Stepien’s 31% added to Ogunrinu’s 15% would not beat Patty Holohan’s 53%.
Oh well, I thought, maybe numbers aren’t Berry’s strength.
Maybe he is a wordsmith, maybe he is able to make a compelling argument by marshalling verbal rhetoric and logical connections.
I was disappointed again when Berry started throwing around the right-wing shibboleths “Marxist” and “critical race theory (CRT).”
By now, even most educated Republicans know that school kids are not being taught CRT and that 99.99% of the people educating our kids are not quoting from “Das Kapital” on a regular basis.
But, of course, we are talking about the “make America great again” fever-dream version of these ideas, which means that anyone who has the audacity to point out that racism came over on the Mayflower and has yet to be fully resolved is an anti-American commie.
All these disappointments — the lack of basic numeracy and the either lacking or unethical rhetorical skills — left me with final thought: John Berry should write better commentaries.
Ian Jones, Redlands