To the editor:

Two recent letters to the editor which you’ve published, objecting to the renaming of Alexandria streets, are particularly offensive. Both letters, which seem to be tone-deaf and insensitive to the community around them, conveniently minimize the fact that the streets in question honor individuals who led the fight against the United States in a war – the country’s deadliest – whose main purpose was to perpetuate the assumption that it is legally or morally defensible to support the enslavement of other human beings.

This should be odious to everyone, regardless of color. And do the writers really think that the names on those streets are just everyday names, and that they don’t specifically refer to the leaders of that other country and its war against the United States? One can’t help wondering if – when the writers were students in school, and they said that “the dog ate my homework” – did they really believe that, too?

-Stephen Leeds, Alexandria