Regarding the April 12 My View, "Who speaks for boys' interests in New Mexico?": Paul Golding wrote of his concern for the number of boys failing to make it through school and into manhood successfully. He asks if anyone cares.

The Santa Fe Branch of the American Association of University Women cares! Girls' achievement has improved since the early 1990s due, in part, to AAUW's effort to encourage girls to stay in school. This achievement didn't come at the boys' expense. In 2008, AAUW published a report "Where the Girls Are." It looked at research data from SAT and ACT college entrance exams and the National Assessment of Education Progress, and at other federal statistics on college attendance, earned degrees and other measures of achievement. The research showed girls have indeed improved in math and science.

However, the results show boys who stay in school are doing slightly better on standardized tests than girls. The major factors in the underachievement of boys and girls are economic and ethnic. There is indeed a crisis for all children in low-income homes. Our society needs to address this crisis.



Why, in our small town of fewer than 100,000 people, do we have two phone books and two small phone books? Why in our small town do I get two weekly sets of ads from grocery stores and other local emporiums? And why is there no easy way to opt out of all of it?

I've contacted the person in charge of Santa Fe's Yellow Pages recycling (twice!) and have yet to hear a response. I've contacted the distributing company, Valassis, that handles one of the weekly pile of ads I get, but have yet to hear back. I guess I should ask you personally to stop mailing me The New Mexican's weekly Review and pack of ads as well. In our day and age of digital downloads and using Google to get me where I want, why are we still so wasteful?



Regarding "Social insecurity" (May 6): Lawrence Franklin seems not to understand how Social Security works. Personal contributions are only 6.2 percent (employer match is 6.2 percent). If Social Security didn't exist, companies likely wouldn't convert those match payments into employee salaries. The amount a median-income household would have to invest would only be about $3,115 annually.

In Lawrence's world, households would have 40 years to invest and grow their privatized nest egg. Most people don't graduate high school or college into median-wage jobs. It takes years of climbing the work ladder to reach the peak income years.

Regarding the long-term annual return of 7 percent Lawrence says can be obtained "in a brokerage account"; there have been several multi-year periods in history (such as 2001 to now) where stocks have failed to produce positive returns.

Social Security is not a retirement account: It's a whole life insurance plan. It protects the families of individuals should they become, blind, disabled or die, without regard to how much "equity" one may have built up in the system.



We now have proof of the criminal actions taken during the Bush Administration. This makes criminal prosecution of Bush administration officials for torture and war crimes an absolute necessity.

Prosecution is not retribution, it is the maintenance of law and the repudiation of torture and other illegal acts. If we don't prosecute the people who wrote and enacted the illegal torture laws, we are condoning them. If we don't hold accountable the people who lied to us about why we needed to get into a war that has destroyed the lives of millions, this makes us guilty as a nation for the perpetration of criminal actions.

What kind of message are we sending to the rest of the world if we do not hold our own citizens responsible for committing war crimes? It certainly does not make our country safer. In fact, it does just the opposite.