Go a bit north on Highway 101 to San Rafael on a Sunday and take the Lucas Valley Road exit and head east to McInnis Park. Before the golf course there are two soccer fields, one on the left and one on the right. On the right there is also a baseball diamond, not used right now. There are some pretty substantial crowds watching the matches on Sundays. My dog Marco and I go there for a walk often as there is a pleasant path around the fields, lots of trash containers to deposit the poop bags and the chance to meet other dogs.

The greatest opportunity, though, is to play Garbage Man. Every picnic table, every miniature grandstand and every group of families standing by the sidelines is surrounded by garbage—beer cans, water bottles, chip bags and on and on. All this in the presence of trash containers, many right next to them. One most disturbing details is the soccer field and diamond on the right are bordered by a slough that leads the bay that leads to the ocean. I’ve often collected blowing plastic just before it blew over the bank.

I don’t know where the failure is here, but some family values there on Sunday seem to be in question.

Robert D. Bock

San Rafael

Rim Shot

Sun readers have no doubt by now read that the prime minister of the United Kingdom has resigned over her incompetent relationship with Brexit.

This should come as no surprise. After all, it is the end of May.

Craig J. Corsini

San Rafael

Historical Wrongs

In American history the Reconstruction Era was the period from 1863 to 1877. It was a significant chapter in the history of American civil rights. It ended Confederacy and slavery, making the newly free slaves citizens with civil rights guaranteed by three new Constitutional amendments.

Reconstruction ultimately failed and for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude continues to this day. The Pew Research Center shows that among full and part-time workers in the U.S., blacks in 2015 earned only 75 percent as much as whites. The average hourly wages for black and Hispanic men were $15 and $14 respectively, compared with $21 for white men.

Black and Hispanic men have made no progress in reducing the wage gap with white men since 1980, due to no improvements in the hourly earnings of white, black or Hispanic men over this 35-year period. Inflation, plus the purchasing power of the San Francisco Bay Area, that now leads the world in numbers of billionaires, has created a disparity that will only grow worse each year.

Some view this growing disparity as not only unfair, but immoral.

Dennis Kostecki

Sausalito