Readers Write (Aug. 18): Enforcing MnPass, Jill Stein, GMOs, snow removal policies, Minnesota's heritage

So for the next two years, six state troopers will patrol MnPass lanes looking for cheaters, at a cost of $2.6 million, but that cost, they say, will be taken from the fines handed out ("No more free pass to cheat MnPass," Aug. 17). So $2.6 million divided by 520 weekdays is $5,000 in tickets a day. I don't believe it.

Let's look at the cost of catching cheaters from another perspective. In 2009, MnPass toll revenue was $1,256,380, almost $200,000 less than the cost to operate MnPass (tinyurl.com/mnpass-analysis). So we are now going to be paying more money to catch a handful of cheaters than is collected by the whole MnPass system? Let me point out, too, that since toll revenue doesn't even cover the operating costs of MnPass, none of the collected toll money even goes to the construction and maintenance of these roads. So why should I be prohibited from driving in these lanes that I paid for with my tax dollars?

Every time a cop has a suspected cheater pulled over, traffic will slow further as a result of gawkers. Shouldn't the cops be out dealing with serious crime instead?

I suggest we close up this failed experiment and allow everyone to use all of the lanes and get to where they need to be going a little faster.

Make no mistake, Jill Stein's appearance here on Tuesday was a presidential campaign stop, and although I agree with her on many issues, I'm sticking with Hillary Clinton. Just like Ralph Nader in 2000, Stein can't win, but her efforts could, predictably, elect Donald Trump — or at least throw some states into his camp.

The top reason friends give for voting for Nader 16 years ago was to "send a message," but it was heard and heeded by exactly nobody. Then they get huffy and insist they have a right to vote for anyone they wish to. I agree. We each have that absolute right, hands down. But here's the thing, and it bears thinking hard about: Can they live with the consequences?

Those votes for Nader, instead of for Al Gore, were more than enough to swing the election to George W. Bush. And not just they, but all of us, worldwide, got to live with the consequences: the murderous war of choice in Iraq with the Mideast chaos it spawned, a spiraling military budget, huge unaffordable tax cuts, a growing deficit, etc. The "message" the world heard was that the most powerful nation on earth preferred a bumbling warmonger. Can you fathom how much worse Trump would be?

• • •

Choosing whom to vote for in the presidential election is going to be tough, but my choice got a little simpler today. I learned that, with all of the important issues facing the U.S., one candidate thinks that police brutality is a top priority ("Green Party's Jill Stein call for an end to police brutality," Aug. 17). It is amazing to me that someone who graduated from Harvard would think that. It is extremely rare for the police to kill someone without justification. Almost always, when a police officer shoots someone, it is because that person was endangering someone's life.

The next president needs to work to reduce the national debt, figure out how to pay for Social Security and Medicare, create an environment conducive to business formation, and work to reduce terrorism. Reducing police brutality would not appear in my top 10 list of concerns.

In the past several weeks, I have read the back-and-forth on GMO (genetically modified organism) crops. Let's take one very common crop and look at its history: the Texas Ruby Red grapefruit, found in most stores as fresh fruit or juice.

In 1929, farmers stumbled on the Ruby Red, a natural mutant. Its flesh fades to pink; however, scientists fired radiation into seeds to produce mutants of deeper color. Star Ruby (1971) and Rio Red (1985), the radiated mutant offspring, now account for 75 percent of all Texas fruit.

A multitude of crops has been genetically modified by this process. The method was promoted by the U.S. government in the 1950s as part of its Atoms for Peace program.

I actively raise corn and soybeans in southern Minnesota. One main reason I plant "Frankenstein" corn is that, in doing so, I do not have to poison the soil with extremely hazardous chemicals or be subjected to them when applying them to kill corn rootworm and corn borer. Now the control of these pests is through the crystalline structure in the corn plant derived from a naturally occurring bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis. This bacterium is available from many garden stores to be used as an organic insecticide. When a vulnerable insect eats the Bt-containing plant, the protein is activated in its gut, forming a toxin that paralyzes the insect's digestive system.

So one must ask which is better to feed the world's bulging population: millions of tons of insecticide or the use of GMO crops.

Lest the residents of St. Louis Park think as a result of a mention in "Sorry, citizens, keep on shoveling" (Aug. 17) that we residents in Coon Rapids live in a utopian paradise where all of our sidewalks are shoveled by city crews, let me set the record straight. While I do not know all of the streets in our city, neither I nor any friend I can think of has sidewalks on our streets. If we want to take a walk, we walk in the street or on a few of the city walking paths. My townhouse association has paths, which the association shovels, and I pay monthly dues for this service. There are sidewalks on busy streets, and they are plowed by the city. The article in the paper did not mention this difference.

I was struck by the juxtaposition of a lead story Aug. 16 calling the late Gov. Wendell Anderson "quintessential" and celebrating his commitment to "all things Swedish" with the item below in which Milwaukee was supposedly "taken by surprise" in the latest episode of violence in a poor black neighborhood.

The U.S. is not and never has been "quintessentially" white. Minnesota has long stopped being majority Scandinavian, if it ever was so. With all due respect to the current governor and our memories of a fine former governor, a good first step in transcending white privilege would be to stop talking as if a Scandinavian were somehow more Minnesotan than the rest of us.

We could also stop expressing surprise when people not considered quintessential experience "unrest." And then we could perhaps get on with the work of building a future shared by all.