Jill DeLong, St. Cloud
I enjoy reading the Sartell-St. Stephen Newsleader on my lunch breaks at work, especially the Blotter. There’s nothing better than reading between the lines of finding teenagers in a parked car or someone inadvertently helping a guy find his lost dog by calling the police on him. The in-depth coverage of this community’s struggle to get a library is fascinating. But that Jan. 8 opinion piece by Ron Scarbro, a man who moved from Sartell to Georgia, about the First Amendment was the worm in this otherwise delicious homegrown fruit. There are so many better ways to defend the First Amendment than to fall back on racist, demeaning, insensitive and vague commentary like he did. And we certainly don’t need to outsource our racism from Georgia: we have plenty of our own here. Thankfully, we have the great work of UniteCloud to counteract sentiments like Scarbro’s, where Haji and Natalie work hard to raise awareness of the non- and anti-racists in our community (Minneapolis’s own award-winning author Marlon James has a good short video clip on those terms: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2016/jan/13/marlon-james-are-you-racist-video) by getting donations for the needy, speaking out against racism and even meeting with our state senators and representatives this week. I sincerely hope to read more from people in our own community who are still here and are actively working to make it better, like Natalie, Haji and all of the community fighters for the library, than someone who left and has nothing to offer us but his callous, outdated musings.