Winston-Salem Journal LTE's WE 11/02/11

Winston-Salem Pride
On Oct. 15, Winston-Salem hosted its first gay Pride event in 15 years. Estimates of more than 5,000 attendees have been offered, a number that both shocks and excites me. As half of the manpower behind an outreach table at Pride, I got a broad taste of the atmosphere of the event. I was deeply impressed by the sense of openness and dignity the event fostered in its attendees.
To be honest, my experience with other cities' Pride events had made me skeptical of the concept in general. The past two summers, I attended Washington's Capital Pride Street Festival, an event that attracts hundreds of thousands of attendees from around the country. Frankly, I was offended by many aspects of DC's Pride. People behaved with reckless abandon. Condoms were distributed by the handful. Even the trash cans sported the logo of a sexually explicit company. Capital Pride simply did not offer an accurate representation of my community. By reducing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people to sex, the event only reinforced "Sodom and Gomorrah" stereotypes.
Winston-Salem Pride, however, was an entirely different type of festival. A friend of mine noted that she "could not recall ever being in a crowd of happier people." Pride was truly an event to be proud of. By valuing our community's relationships, families and sense of decency, Winston-Salem Pride united a community used to invisibility. Thank you, Equality Winston-Salem, for uniting the queer community around our common dignity.

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LINDSEY HERMAN
Winston-Salem

Job creators
I finally get it. I read the headline "Gap between rich and poor widens: Income nearly triples for top 1 percent of U.S. households" (Oct. 27) — and I got it. The top 1 percent has seen its income rise 275 percent since 1979 while middle-class income rose only 40 percent. That explains everything.
That's why the unemployment rate is so low. These are the "job creators." They made all that money and created jobs across the heartland of America. They created so many jobs, they had some to spare, so they shipped them overseas.
Wow! Let's cut their taxes even more and given them more money. They will create so many jobs that we can pick and choose. Glory, glory. I get it!

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RICHARD GROVES
Winston-Salem

A few questions
A few questions to the Occupiers of Wall Street:

• If they manage to collapse the fiscal system called "Wall Street," are they aware that their parents' and grandparents' pension funds are in there and would be gone?

• What economic system do they have in place to immediately replace the one they are trying to collapse? And if they don't have one, why not?

• If OWS is a start of a "revolution," will it be modeled after the French, Russian or possibly a new Industrial revolution?

• Why aren't they protesting at the colleges and universities that charge the fees and tuitions that they, as students, are forced to pay ? Have they ever asked for a breakdown of how those colleges and universities spend their tuition and fees?

These are things the average 53 percenter would like to know; do they have answers?

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STEVE HENDERSON
Winston-Salem

Accountability and vision
Anyone with a passing acquaintance with columnist Michael Reagan's work already knows the man's an unhinged idiot. That in mind, I was of course wary while I read his column on the Occupy Wall Street protests ("Protestors should just go home," Oct. 27), but as haggard and incoherent as Reagan's braying about malcontent activists polluting the cities proved to be, it was certainly no worse than I expect from a coattail-riding hack like him.
One suggestion, though: If the Journal insists on visiting upon its paying subscribers the inanities of grumpy establishmentarians like Reagan, perhaps it's time to drop that credo you print in the lower left corner of the editorial page — you know, the one about demanding "accountability and vision from our leaders" and trying to provide "you, our readers, with the same."
I know nobody at the Journal bothered to fact-check Reagan's claim that most of the protestors are living off their parents' dime. That idea is nonsense, by the way: Many of the protestors are old enough to be parents themselves. And Reagan's apparent belief that the protestors are there because they don't want entry-level jobs is a deliberate misrepresentation of their grievances, which, I think we can agree, falls a touch shy of qualifying as "vision."
If publishing the lies of morons with familiar names is all this editorial page aims to do, then sure, Reagan's your man. But if "accountability" and "vision" really are your goals, you'll have to look elsewhere.

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JORDAN HOLLIDAY
Winston-Salem