‘America pushes back’ would be good headline

This 70-year-old white female boarded a bus at 6 p.m. Friday, night, marched with hundreds of thousands of humans in Washington D.C on Saturday, Jan. 21, and returned home Sunday at 10 a.m. to read the Daily Herald’s headline, “Women push back.”

While it is true that women made up the majority of marchers in the Women’s March on Washington, men, every age group, every color and creed, every religion, LGBTQ, and every ethnicity were represented. The headline in the Daily Herald could more accurately have been, “America pushes back.”

My sweatshirt said “Women’s Rights are Human Rights,” but every other human rights issue was represented in the thousands of signs being carried in the march. Civil rights, voting rights, LGBT rights, environmental justice, criminal justice, black lives matter, immigration rights … all these issues, and more, are threatened by the Trump Administration and the Republican Congress. My generation fought a lot of these battles 50 years ago, and we can’t understand why anyone would want to go backward, not forward. The goal of every president should be to make America greater.

The Women’s March on Washington featured some terrific call and response chants from the marchers. Here are a few that are very representative. “What does democracy look like? This is what democracy looks like!”

“What does America look like? This is what America looks like!”

“We won’t go away! Welcome to your first day!”

Quoting Frederick Douglass, “The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Diane Niesman

Wheaton

Health costs will still rise if profit remains goal

To all who believe the ACA caused the rise in your health insurance costs: We have a health insurance system that is a for-profit business. Check the salaries of the CEO’s of Aetna, Cigna, United Healthcare. Rates will continue to rise as long as profit not health care remains the primary goal of these companies. Our health should never come below profit. Improve the ACA (Obamacare). Explore the single payer health insurance system for all of us.

Mary Chiappetta

St. Charles