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We welcome your comments. Send them to [email protected], or post them on our website, rochestercitynewspaper.com, our Facebook page, or our Twitter feed, @roccitynews. Comments of fewer than 350 words have a greater chance of being published, and we do edit selections for publication in print. We don't publish comments sent to other media.

Homegrown terrorists are a bigger threat

So President Trump is tightening vetting procedures for immigrants seeking to live in America, in particular certain Middle Eastern nations with Muslim majority populations, due to concerns on terrorism.

We all know there are bigger concerns with domestic terrorism participants such as Dylann Roof, who went on a killing rampage at a black church in South Carolina, and so many other mass-murder incidents over the years.

Will Trump be as zealous about the wannabe domestic terrorists in our midst? Let's ask our Second Amendment people on that.

DAVID HENNELLY

Roll credits

With all the concerns about issues generating from Trump's election, let us not lose track of what's really important: an evening at the movies with our favorite folks at affordable enough prices that you can include the whole neighborhood.

Cinema Movies 10 in Henrietta will be missed and I call on someone to replace it.

JILLIAN GRUBER

Family story imparts a warning

I am writing about the president's ban on Muslims entering this country that was signed on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

My grandparents immigrated to this country in the 1940's. My Christian grandfather and my Jewish grandmother escaped Nazi Germany and settled in Rochester.

My grandmother was admitted to Strong Memorial Hospital with an ulcer around 1942. They had very few relatives in this country and they were poor, so they fit the profile of people selected for a terrible act.

My grandmother was told that she was going to be upgraded to a special room for her treatment. My grandmother, unbeknownst to her, was injected with plutonium and studied to see the effects.

Of the seven people injected at Strong as part of the government's Manhattan Project, my grandmother lived the longest. She was very sick and had six different kinds of cancer after the injection.

Her family physician knew of the injections and reported to the military on her health or lack of. He died knowing that she was injected and never told her or our family. My grandmother died never knowing what she had been subjected to.

Our family found out about this when Eileen Welsome FOIL-ed the records for her book, "The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War."

She thought that animals had been injected at the hospital and found out people had been, too.

We also discovered that my grandmother's grave at Mount Hope was exhumed so the government could continue to study the effects of plutonium on her bones.

I write this letter so we all know that we don't want to go back to those times.

I write this letter in support of all refugees and immigrants (no immigrant is illegal).

I write this letter to say resist the fascist.

JON STADT

Astacio needs help

Rochester City Court Judge Leticia Astacio seems to be seen in the media as a normal human being who drinks alcohol and then defies the law. But she appears more like an individual whose problems have resulted in drug addiction — her drug of choice being alcohol.

The incidents following her DWI conviction could be seen as cries for help to get her a diagnosis and/or treatment.

She has made it clear that she cannot do her job, but the question "Why?" should be answered.

BYRNA WEIR

Parking on Park is a problem

I received a parking ticket because the appointment I had on Park Avenue ran over and I couldn't move my car to the other side of the street. I explained this to the city, but still had to pay the $50 fine.

I started using a parking lot that the business I frequent on Park told me about. But I came out of my appointment and my car was gone. It was towed to Bay Street and it cost me $129.60 to get it back. Apparently there were some problems with bars in that area.

The Park Avenue Merchants Association should research this issue and see if some type of large public parking area could be created. Parking has been a huge problem in this area for years.

I am a retired senior citizen on a fixed income and this was a severe financial hardship for me. There is no consideration of sliding fees depending on income.

I have never had a car towed before and objected very strongly to this fact and to the exorbitant fee, to no avail. I was told that if I didn't like it, I could call someone to pick me up. I live 45 minutes away, so that was not an option. And I still had to recover my car.

I was 40 minutes late for an activity I planned that evening. And I could've been out even more money if I had purchased expensive tickets for an event that night.

I hope that others who have had similar problems voice their concerns.

KATHY HOUSTON

Look within to explain Trump

I have been following the thread of letters regarding the ramifications of Donald Trump's election.

It is important to recognize the comparisons between Hitler and Trump and to be concerned about the potential of "it could happen here." But it is also important that we remember and recognize that neither Hitlerism nor Trumpism arose in vacuums, and that the rise of the Nazis in Germany was not merely a dictator-imposed decree.

Neither Hitler nor Trump was so charismatic as to persuade the populace of their countries to elect them democratically simply because they brought a message of change and national chauvinism. Instead, they tapped into fascistic feelings already well-entrenched in the minds of citizens in their respective countries. This is the most troubling aspect of the current election and its aftermath.

When Trump supporters gather as gangs of motorcyclists to "protect" their president from protesters, how far are we from brown-shirted storm troopers in Nazi Germany? I am also disturbed to know more than a few highly educated professionals who voted for and supported Trump, thinking themselves safe and only likely to benefit from his bellicose "America First" rhetoric that seems a thinly veiled disguise for being able to define a "real" America that allows exclusion of whole groups based on gender, skin color, language, race, or religion (or lack of religion).

Exactly, I fear, what their Jewish counterparts in Germany thought in the 1930's: "Hitler will make our country strong again, and I have nothing to fear because I am a well-respected store owner, businessman, banker, doctor, scientist." Which all worked fine until the Nazis decided to scapegoat them and engineered the Holocaust. (Or perhaps there wasn't a Holocaust; maybe we should check for "alternative facts" from Steve Bannon or Kellyanne Conway?).

So my fear is not so much Trump and his immediate minions (who are bad enough), but the vein of hatred and intolerance he has tapped into that has become so widespread in the American populace.

It is no coincidence that the popularity of scripted "reality" shows, that are the equivalent of cage fighting in living rooms, board rooms, mansions, and farms has resulted in the election of a president who hails from that same background and who champions the rawest feelings in the citizens to whom he panders.

Would anyone disagree with the following observation: "It would never come into their heads (the broad masses of a nation) to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation."

Doesn't the appeal to "alternative facts" and the constant lambasting of the independent media by team Trump sound precisely like the impudence referred to in the quotation? The quotation, by the way, is from Mein Kampf.

J. FINGEROTH