Our flawed and racist founders left us with a brilliant Constitution

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To the editor: As racist as the founders of this country were, the fact remains that they provided us with a framework to overcome everything that deleteriously impacts on us the Constitution of the United States. (Happy Birthday to a Fragile and Divided America, Editorial, July 4)

With this foundation, we, as a people, must unite, if necessary, to overcome whatever hinders our quest for life, freedom and happiness. That’s what’s great about America and all Americans, whatever their color.

When the oppressed want to rise up to overcome societal imbalances, the Constitution allows us to do so. This is why we have survived as a nation, and why we will continue to survive as a nation and as a people. There is hope.

As we move forward, we will continue to learn how to do it together, overcome whatever hinders our progress, and reach our personal definitions of life, freedom, happiness and peace.

Greg Sirbu, Redondo Beach

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To the editor: Your aspiration for an America of robust health and shared prosperity, an America open to immigration and innovation, an America with social mobility and a strong middle class, an America confident enough to recognize and taking into account the tragedies of its past, an America with a shared civic vocabulary and openness to debate in good faith sounds like an unrealistic chimera when all our institutional and capitalist forces are deployed against it.

Republicans are successfully wresting the right to vote from citizens who tend to vote Democrats, and they even have the Supreme Court firmly in their hands. Congress has shown that it is powerless to act.

The only hope appears to be the 2022 midterm elections. Yet even there, Democratic victories will almost certainly be challenged endlessly by Republican state governments and in the courts, and possibly even overturned by legislatures controlled by the GOP.

While the odds are stacked against us, we need to find new and smarter ways to fight back.

Kenneth Canatsey, Agoura Hills

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To Editor: This year’s coverage of Independence Day in the Times was darker than it was a year ago, when Donald Trump was president and the pandemic was raging. Yet today we face our failures with the intention of remedying them.

Despair and shame get us nowhere. What is needed is the radical love, the conviction that was in all of this combined with practical help programs that will improve people’s lives.

Today we have a president who is committed to both, but the Times offers little hope for reform and wallows in the kind of guilt that benefits no one.

Glenn Pascall, Dana Point

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