. . . I also would like to see sound walls erected on OUR side of the 10, and not just the side on wealthy Cheviot Hills Homeowners' side. I have nothing against their getting a wall, just that we should have one, too. There are more people closer to the 10 on the Palms side than the Cheviot Hills side.

STEVEN D. KLEIN
June 25, 2006

[Editor's note: The original was sent to the Palms Neighborhood Council. This is a public record.]

I read with dismay the article in the Palms Village Sun reporting yet another impediment to renaming the Palms-Rancho Park library in honor of Ray Bradbury.  Mr. Bradbury is a longtime Cheviot Hills resident, Los Angeles booster and, of course, a national treasure and literary light; such renaming is long overdue.
 
At the upcoming board meeting of the Cheviot Hills Homeowners’ Assn., I will move that the association support such a renaming.

JONATHAN WEISS
June 20, 2006

[Editor's note: This is a copy of a letter sent to Richard Harmetz of the Westside Neighborhood Council. Weiss is the secretary of the Cheviot Hills HOA.]

[Editor's note: The Palms Neighborhood Council sent two e-mails recently to its mailing list.

[One, Spanish-language publicity for the recent Council election, is at the top; it urges recipients to not forget to vote for their officlals on Sunday, May 21.

[The other, an announcement of a committee meeting, is at the bottom; its text, translated to English, states "If you need interpretation services, please notify the office 3 days (72 hours) before the event. If you need assistance with this notice, please call our office at (213) 485-1360).

[The Council received the following two responses, which are public records.]

Dear Secretary,
 
Please DO NOT send me Spanish correspondence.  It is a shame that we have to accommodate these lazy latinos who refuse to learn English and I find it offensive that their language is forced upon me.  It is blatant irredentism and wrong to promote their language.  This is the United States of America and English is the official national language.  It is a waste of public resources to continue to accommodate people who refuse to assimulate and learn the language of the country they have relocated.
 
Why are we wasting our time and resources publishing Spanish versions of everything.  These people need to learn English like the rest of the world who moves here. Why do the Asian, Middle Eastern, European people all learn English and yet these Latinos do not?  It's not fair to those cultures to have Spanish correspondence and not theirs — where/when does it stop?!

TOM RYAN
May 19, 2006

Please DO NOT SEND me Spanish correspondence.  I do NOT speak Spanish and find it offensive to have it shoved upon me.  This is the USA...Our national language is ENGLISH>
 
THANK YOU!

TOM HICKEY
May 22, 2006

The two yokels (don't be fooled by the use of "irredentism," a five-dollar word probably learned from Lou Dobbs) who wrote in complaining about receiving Spanish-language election materials were in error on a number of assertions, and Sun readers should be alerted to these.

For starters, while English was recently declared the "national language" by the Senate, it is not the "official language" by any stretch of the imagination — never has been, never will be.

The recently passed bill has absolutely no impact on voting, in particular: Local election boards are still required by the Voting Rights Act to provide election materials in whatever language in which a citizen feels most comfortable. For what it's worth, campaign and election materials were commonly distributed in Yiddish, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, and Greek in immigrant-heavy cities like Chicago and New York throughout the first quarter of the 20th century.

As for Mr. Ryan's assertion that Europeans, Middle Easterners, and Asians try to learn English, and Latinos don't: horse-apples!

Ever been to Westminster? Wilshire Center? San Gabriel? Glendale? Artesia? West Hollywood? There are plenty of immigrants of all ages — from Vietnam, Korea, China, Armenia, Pakistan, and Russia respectively — in those places who are U.S. citizens who either don't know any English or aren't sufficiently comfortable in it to follow political arguments. Should citizens of those ethnicities in those places be denied the right to vote just because they don't speak English as well as someone with a Nordic or Celtic last name?

If Los Angeles County can print voting instructions in Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, Armenian, and Vietnamese, and the City of Los Angeles can have street signs in Chinese and Korean, the Palms Neighborhood Council should be able to print election materials in Spanish.

One last thing: I find it difficult to believe that anyone in Los Angeles today would actually be proud and defiant about not speaking Spanish — or any other foreign language, for that matter — but I guess there are still an awful lot of redneck holdouts from the days of Poulson and Yorty. Shouldn't you guys have moved to Denver or Phoenix by now, like the rest of your ilk?

PETER MCFERRIN
May 30, 2006

P.S. I moved to Mar Vista a few months back so I could rent a single-family house (over by Venice High School, almost in Venice itself), but I still do an awful lot of eating and hanging out in Palms. Thanks for your continued hard work with The Sun, Mr. Garrigues.