This past weekend at our neighborhood’s annual rummage sale, my friend asked about the price of a planter. When she readily agreed to it, the resident said she was glad she hadn’t tried to ‘Jew her down.’

In 20 years in this neighborhood, this is what’s happened to us:

— My non-white husband was pelted with eggs while mowing the lawn.

— He turned the key in our front door while wearing a suit and carrying his briefcase, and was confronted by police asking if he lived here.

Here’s how this happens, how it begins: at our annual block party a few years ago, my neighbor leveled a labored and vicious joke at my religion. I said nothing. I was wrong. Challenge hatred when you hear it even when the response is “Oh, I have Jewish friends” or “It’s just a saying.” Confront it even from those who see themselves as well traveled, educated, cultured, who discuss liberal politics over coffee in rainbow-flagged shops. Perhaps especially those who fail to recognize it in themselves. The majority of good people here cannot let remarks from a few just pass. Confront hatred as my friend did this weekend while it’s still just spoken — or we can’t then be surprised when eggs become bullets.

Diane Brockington, Mission Hills

The new City Council regulations regarding dockless bikes and scooters are indeed welcome. However, there is still an urgent need for laws to be passed that all of them have horns, bells or whistles to alert pedestrians and drivers to their presence. Why is this not obvious? In New York City, when I was 3 years old, even then I was not allowed to ride my tricycle unless the warning bell was working.

Laura Walcher, a continuing Bankers Hill ducking and sidestepping resident

Re: David Wang’s guest editorial

I commend him for his sincere attitude and wish him well; what I must say, is that hate, envy and stupidity will never leave humanity regardless of our development, for it’s a very integral part of the human psyche to blame others for one’s shortcomings and failures, and to hate an identifiable group for any perceived advantages they seek.

It’s the state of our media in the current era that causes these terrible retaliations on innocents by merely reporting an incident that, with no widespread notice would go unduplicated; a man hijacks a plane over New York to fly him to Cuba which gave us the term “skyjacking,” followed by a man skyjacking a plane to drop him over Washington state with $200,000 giving the world a new pastime.

They can’t go unreported, of course, but this is what gives us repetition, and bloodbaths; news up the yin yang 24 hours a day.

Stnagunish Helfin!!!

Saul Harmon Gritz, Hillcrest