I appreciated the coverage of Representative Swalwell’s December Town Hall meeting in your January edition of the Echo. I attended that meeting.
The first speaker, Sandra, said she had a Palestinian friend from San Mateo who had just lost thirty family members from Gaza two days earlier. She asked Rep.Swalwell for much more attention to Palestinian concerns and deaths. The very first thing he did then was to criticize her for not evaluating his self-described “good guy” role in supporting Israel but not completely. He had nothing to say concerning her friend’s stunning loss of family.
The next speaker was Mack Levine who described himself as a “non-Zionist Jew.” Levine said that he would set aside his own questions in order to discuss Rep.Swalwell’s dismissive reaction to Sandra’s devastating remarks. To be sure, imagine that any one of us or a close friend lost both mother and father and sisters and brothers and children and aunts and uncles and grandparents, nieces and nephews, all at the same time. Who would anticipate other than a sympathetic response from our elected official, or anyone else for that matter, upon hearing such news?
When the discussion moved to calling for a ceasefire, Rep. Swalwell offered his own idea of what the word meant. Does that mean that each elected government official can choose their own definition of terms? In what universe does that work? High school debate teams learn early on that terms must be defined before the debate begins. To reach any conclusion, one must pinpoint the target. Without forethought, success is not possible.
What it says to me is that our elected officials sometimes assume personal responses to international situations of grave importance without enough attention to equitable decision making and its accompanying compromises. Instead of working together with their constituency toward realizable goals by hearing first and foremost what the people are saying can undercut worn out rhetoric in order to solve any problem.
M Hogan
Fremont
Eric Swalwell talks like an old white Republican from the 1970’s. Remembering how many years good old Pete Stark was our congressman, it makes me SICK that Swalwell is our representative and might be so long after I’m gone. He’s a representative of corporate power and the military-industrial complex. Congressman Stark had time to actually personally answer letters from his constituents, while Swalwell only answers, if at all, in thoughtless boilerplate that completely ignores whatever question or comment his constituents bother to post via his web form plus write, print, and mail to him at both offices.
I’m a retired teacher and technical writer and a Hayward home owner whose son is a Hayward City Council member, and it makes me sick that we the people of Hayward, the town with “No Room for Racism!” have a “representative” who seems to get off on war! Any war!
I’ve asked him formally, politely, concisely, in perfectly written and printed letters, if he has read the following books. He’s probably just smart enough to realize that it’s a rhetorical question, and of course he hasn’t answered. He OWES me an answer. Out of 10 letters I’ve written him, all concise, polite, and dealing with important, pressing issues, I’ve gotten zero answers. Computers spitting out boilerplate is NOT an answer. He works for me, but doesn’t seem to realize this very basic fact. Here are the 3 books:
• Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy (1956)
• Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky (1988)
• The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (2017)
Any member of Congress who hasn’t read these books, which this fool clearly hasn’t even heard of, or their equivalent, has no business having the powerful and important job of Congress Member in the richest, most powerful, most VIOLENT country in the world! “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world is my own government”, said Martin Luther King in 1967. I say the greatest purveyor of violence in my DISTRICT is Eric Swalwell.
Notice the cowboy hat, the CIA logo, and the cross in the picture atop your good article!