Opinion

Don Christopher wears a crisp, dark shirt embroidered with a 60-year medallion over the pocket. It commemorates a proud achievement for a business, but dresses a walking portal to history with a encyclopedic recall, a window into an how the global agricultural revolution underwent transformation during the second half of the 20th Century, and in Don’s case, transformed a community.

Pro: Marc Perkel You know you're in a Free Country when you can burn the Flag. President Elect Donald Trump says the people should lose their citizenship if you burn the Flag. Unfortunately Trump doesn't know enough about America to understand what free speech is all about. Trump doesn't have the right to summarily override the Constitution and rule by fiat that America will have reduced rights once he becomes King. America is a country of the people, for the people and by the people. The people are the fourth and most important branch of government. Some say that our Second Amendment right arose out of the need to overthrow the government by force should the government forget that its job is the serve and not rule the people. Our right to burn the flag comes from those same principles but had the advantage of not killing people in the process. When the people can burn the flag it signifies the dominance of the people over the government. When we can't it signifies the dominance of the government over the people. Russians can't burn the flag but we can because we are a free nation. Having said that, I encourage people to not burn the flag in response to Trump. Trump is just being a troll and he wants to create division between people to distract attention away from the fact that his buddies in Russia helped get him elected. So even though you have the right, don't burn the flag because Trump wants you to. If you are a patriot and you love America and you believe Americans are better united than divided then go hug a liberal and give a conservative a big wet kiss on the mouth and show the Donald that we the people understand the American dream, even if he doesn't get it. Gilroyan Marc Perkel has become a national voice for protecting people’s rights, even the right to burn an American flag. See him debate FOX News’s Tucker Carlson here: http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/11/29/flag-burning-advocate-donald-trump-marc-perkel-government Against: Mark Turner My father was a United States Marine. He was proud of his military service and of his service to his countryman.His service helped shape his view, his values and his pride in this great nation. He instilled those values and that pride in his three boys.Growing up I can remember my Dad proudly flew the American flag in front of our house every day. He taught us to have a deep abiding respect for America's veterans and military personnel and his actions showed us to have high regard for the flag.   Throughout our history brave Americans fought to gain or to defend freedom and liberty. In each of those conflicts the American flag was either carried in, raised in victory, worn on the uniforms of the soldiers, or on the minds of those defending the Stars and Stripes, the Banner of America. Yes, I believe America is, as President Reagan used to say, the last best hope of man on earth.This, “great experiment,” which was birthed in a small dusty hall in Philadelphia nearly 240 years ago, launched a nation with immense faith, incredible responsibility and a position of high calling.Our position in the world didn't just happen, but was fought for by brave soldiers throughout our history. The same hallowed flag that men and women willingly go to battle for, drapes the casket of those who laid down their lives defending her.  Just because protestors have the ‘’right’’ to burn the flag, doesn’t mean burning the flag is right. Some see the flag as a symbol to burn, as for me, it’s a symbol that ignites a fire within me for a great nation that John Winthrop referred to as “a shining city upon a hill.”To those who take pride in exercising your free speech right as you light the flag on fire, men and women in our armed forces will continue to fight for that right, protect the homeland and make incredible sacrifices on your behalf. That in itself deserves some respect and appreciation. Although he hails from Morgan Hill, Mark Turner spends most of his life in Gilroy as President of the Chamber of Commerce and formerly, as a pastor. The Gilroy Dispatch seeks your editorials, comments and letters. Send them to Editor@Gilroydispatch.com  

Here’s how bad the sidewalks in Gilroy are: People in wheelchairs are using the streets to get around, threading through dangerous traffic and risking their lives.Some streets have sidewalks that start and stop with no logic and no ability for people to use them consistently. Businesses—including the towing company owned by City Councilman Dion Bracco—have no sidewalk in front of them. A developer shorted the width of a sidewalk it built and the city inspectors missed it. The same developer moved a soundwall, cutting six inches of space from the public which it gave it to its residents.These were some of the complaints the city’s bike and pedestrian commission brought up before the City Council last week in a stinging report that should be a wake up call for city residents. Sidewalks are like the canary in the coal mine. If a city doesn’t take care of something seemingly small, but so important to the quality of life, how can we depend on it to take care of our other needs?Leo Gonzalez, the vice chair of the commission, who has stepped up to head it, took a huge leap last week, outlining the problem and complaining about the city’s lack of response. The previous year the report was a whitewash, he says, talking about how much progress the city has made. Gonzalez is fine with the progress, but he wants residents to realize how much still needs to be done.He wants the city to be more active in requiring businesses and residents to pay for and maintain sidewalks and the city to be more strict in what it allows.For example, the city is allowing new developments without enough visitor or resident parking spaces, so that developers profit more. The result is four-bedroom homes with two spaces for cars, but more drivers. Cars end up double-parking in their driveways and blocking sidewalks or parking in cramped streets, which blocks access to bikers and endangers passengers when car doors are opened.Then there are older parts of the city, such as Ronan Avenue on the northside, which were unincorporated and brought into the city without sidewalks and are an obstacle course for people on foot, bike or wheelchair. The city never stepped in to build sidewalks there.The city is being sued by the developer of low-income housing on Monterey Street, who claims that because it is a nonprofit, it shouldn’t be required to pay for sidewalks. Gonzalez salutes the city for fighting it. How else are senior citizens in the project supposed to get around, he asks, crossing the “freeway of Monterey Street?”There aren’t even sidewalks leading up to the Monterey bus and train transit center, which is supposed to be a hub for those who want to give up their cars!“Sidewalks are very important, but they are one of the things you take for granted,” says Gonzalez, a sheriff’s deputy who lives in Gilroy.“The majority of people who use the sidewalks are younger kids, elderly people and people with disabilities,” he says. “It’s not until you are in a position like that when you can’t step over steps that you realize how important they are.”We agree with Gonzalez that a city which likes to bill itself as a white picket fence, residential area, needs to make sidewalks and bike paths a much bigger priority than it is doing.As Gonzalez says, you pay for it now, or you pay more later, when someone walking along a street with no safe area dies in an accident and the city is sued.To see the full commission report on sidewalks, go here: http://gilroy.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=16&clip_id=1466            

 Every time I hear about a police shooting I think the same thing: if only the people complaining had a chance to walk a mile in a cop’s shoes.I’ve done it and you can too. It will change you forever.Both the Gilroy Police Department and the Santa Clara Sheriff’s have ride along programs where you can do a shift with a cop and see first hand what they face. You will never look at police the same way.I’ve done ride alongs with agencies across the area and I’ve also taken the Citizens Police Academy in Santa Cruz. My conclusion is that we expect the people in blue to be superhuman, but they are, like the rest of us, only human. Most of them, however, border on superhuman in the challenges they face every day and the way they resolve them peacefully.When you consider that most of us get our information about policing from TV dramas where officers solve cases in a half an hour and do impossible things like shoot a bad guy in the arm to make them drop their gun, it’s easy to see that we often judge them much too harshly.You can sign up for a 12-week, once-a-week course with Gilroy Police (info on the GPD website), an opportunity that I strongly recommend. In Santa Cruz I got to do a staged car chase, arrest “suspects” and shoot in the firing range.The first thing you feel driving in a police car, is that it’s like you have a giant target on your back. There are plenty of people out there who hate police, and even though you are armed, you feel like a sitting duck. There’s virtually nothing to stop someone who hates cops and has access to one of the 315 million guns in America from taking a shot. Cops told me they don’t feel like that, but as a civilian sitting in that car, I sure did.The second thing you learn is that police training is incredibly difficult. You will fail often. Do one of their drills where they have to figure out if they are shooting at an innocent or a bad guy, a real life video game, and you realize it takes Olympian skill and judgment to make the right call. It’s much easier to Monday morning quarterback those situations.The next thing you realize is that many of the people you stop are rude and think you are in the wrong, even when it’s clear they are. A good half the people you stop greet you with malice, and frankly, many of them are people we don’t interact with in daily life. They are on drugs, they are criminals, they are violent and after spending a day with them and an officer, you will thank your lucky stars for the officers who deal with them every day.On a Santa Cruz ridealong recently, I watch a 6-foot-5-inch, 300-pound man attack the 5-foot-5-inch cop I was riding with, while yelling racial epithets at him. The officer asked the man to get off the sidewalk blocking access to a pizzeria; the man refused and got belligerent.For a minute, I was scared for my life, but more scared for the officer. I thought the bigger man could easily grab his gun and things could get violent quickly. I was digging in, getting ready to help the officer if he needed it, when in the blink of an eye, the officer had the man down on the ground and handcuffed, like a martial arts master. That was really superhero stuff. Even more amazing was the fact that the officer remained cool, calm and polite with the man, even when the man, an African American, was calling the officer, a Mexican-American who was once an undocumented immigrant, a “wetback” and using worse terms to provoke him. The officer was used to mistreatment and told me he felt sorry for the man, an alcoholic, and treated him kindly all the way to jail. I’m not saying it’s always this way, but I would argue that it is 99 percent of the time. Yes, there are some unjustified shootings and some cops who use the law to benefit themselves. And yes, we need video cameras to help police the police. But in most cases, the cameras will back the police. People will realize that cops don’t go out to intentionally shoot someone and that the cops would prefer to defuse situations without violence, so they can go home to their families at the end of their workdays, just like the rest of us.  They have a lot more challenges to face every day than we do.                 

Every time I hear about a police shooting I think the same thing: if only the people complaining had a chance to walk a mile in a cop’s shoes.I’ve done it and you can too. It will change you forever.Both the Gilroy Police Department and the Santa Clara Sheriff’s have ride along programs where you can do a shift with a cop and see first hand what they face. You will never look at police the same way.I’ve done ride alongs with agencies across the area and I’ve also taken the Citizens Police Academy in Santa Cruz. My conclusion is that we expect the people in blue to be superhuman, but they are, like the rest of us, only human. Most of them, however, border on superhuman in the challenges they face every day and the way they resolve them peacefully.When you consider that most of us get our information about policing from TV dramas where officers solve cases in a half an hour and do impossible things like shoot a bad guy in the arm to make them drop their gun, it’s easy to see that we often judge them much too harshly.You can sign up for a 12-week, once-a-week course with Gilroy Police (info on the GPD website), an opportunity that I strongly recommend. In Santa Cruz I got to do a staged car chase, arrest “suspects” and shoot in the firing range.The first thing you feel driving in a police car, is that it’s like you have a giant target on your back. There are plenty of people out there who hate police, and even though you are armed, you feel like a sitting duck. There’s virtually nothing to stop someone who hates cops and has access to one of the 315 million guns in America from taking a shot. Cops told me they don’t feel like that, but as a civilian sitting in that car, I sure did.The second thing you learn is that police training is incredibly difficult. You will fail often. Do one of their drills where they have to figure out if they are shooting at an innocent or a bad guy, a real life video game, and you realize it takes Olympian skill and judgment to make the right call. It’s much easier to Monday morning quarterback those situations.The next thing you realize is that many of the people you stop are rude and think you are in the wrong, even when it’s clear they are. A good half the people you stop greet you with malice, and frankly, many of them are people we don’t interact with in daily life. They are on drugs, they are criminals, they are violent and after spending a day with them and an officer, you will thank your lucky stars for the officers who deal with them every day.On a Santa Cruz ridealong recently, I watch a 6-foot-5-inch, 300-pound man attack the 5-foot-5-inch cop I was riding with, while yelling racial epithets at him. The officer asked the man to get off the sidewalk blocking access to a pizzeria; the man refused and got belligerent.For a minute, I was scared for my life, but more scared for the officer. I thought the bigger man could easily grab his gun and things could get violent quickly. I was digging in, getting ready to help the officer if he needed it, when in the blink of an eye, the officer had the man down on the ground and handcuffed, like a martial arts master. That was really superhero stuff. Even more amazing was the fact that the officer remained cool, calm and polite with the man, even when the man, an African American, was calling the officer, a Mexican-American who was once an undocumented immigrant, a “wetback” and using worse terms to provoke him. The officer was used to mistreatment and told me he felt sorry for the man, an alcoholic, and treated him kindly all the way to jail. I’m not saying it’s always this way, but I would argue that it is 99 percent of the time. Yes, there are some unjustified shootings and some cops who use the law to benefit themselves. And yes, we need video cameras to help police the police. But in most cases, the cameras will back the police. People will realize that cops don’t go out to intentionally shoot someone and that the cops would prefer to defuse situations without violence, so they can go home to their families at the end of their workdays, just like the rest of us. They have a lot more challenges to face every day than we do.                 

It’s hard not to think that Gilroy and the state of California are in a different country than the one that swept in a strong Republican, anti-government agenda.Gilroyans took a hard liberal bent and chose to cut sprawling growth out of the city limits and focus on downtown development. It elected a slate of slow-growthers and tossed out those who tried to sneak by a 4,000-house project that would have increased traffic, raised public service expenses and made its developers $3 billion.County voters favored Hillary Clinton by 73 percent. They beat back the “no tax” trend by  increasing fees on cigarettes to fund health programs and increased sales tax to improve transportation. They raised money for the homeless. They funded schools. They pushed back on the exorbitant prices charged by drug companies.Those are huge positives in a national election that seemed to rip the fiber of the country apart.California’s voting trend this time around suggests that if you want to return to a time when America was great, you can look to the 1950s to the 1970s, when people were proud to pay taxes to improve their country. Tax rates on the rich were as high as 90 percent. The rich were still incredibly rich, but they were willing to do their share. Then came the trickle-down theory, which never quite trickled down. This week local voters took bold steps back to the days when people were far more willing to take responsibility for their circumstances and were willing to pay to make thecounty and state great again.Americans may never again experience a campaign season like the one that ended Tuesday—or might they all be like this from now on?The historic nature of the election, the first one where Americans got to vote for a woman as the presidential nominee of a major party, was almost lost during 16 months of daily scandal and insults.News outlets on both ends of the political spectrum, from Fox to MSNBC and innumerable blogs in between, kept Americans hooked, transforming those who were never politically expressive into keyboard pundits, posting their thoughts on Facebook and Twitter.While Barack Obama’s presidential runs in 2008 and 2012 were touted for their use of data and technology, social media came into its own during election 2016, invigorating the electorate like never before.Sure, some Facebook friends were lost in the shuffle, but now as the dust settles, Americans should look to harness some of that energy and enthusiasm and continue to find ways to participate and engage with our nation’s brazen and brow-beaten democracy.Here’s one suggestion: start attending your local City Council and municipal commission meetings. Make it a habit. Usually, the only time people go is when they have a problem, a mission, or are on the agenda. A crowded council chambers says something to elected officials: We are here, we are watching, we care.Better yet, take some time and join local commissions. Become the solution. Get involved. Take control of your government.Both Trump and, during the primaries especially, Bernie Sanders decried our nation’s “rigged” system, basically saying that ordinary citizens have no hope whatsoever of changing the course of their own lives let alone the country’s.Don’t get fooled, get involved.