Taking Issue With Personal Safety

Susan Spano was wrong in her April 29 column (“Kauai Killings Remind Women That Avoiding Danger Is Up to Them,” Her World). Happily, she was not dead wrong.

In her timely cautionary tale, she alerts readers that, even on magnificent Kauai, paradise is getting lost.

However, I take issue with her closing thought that “my safety is no one’s responsibility but my own.” In a world becoming increasingly irresponsible, it’s nice that Spano bucks that trend. But under her reasoning, if she’s standing on a sidewalk and a car jumps the curb and hits her, that’s her responsibility too. That the tourism folks on Kauai were putting money before life and safety was unconscionable.

Spano would have been much more righteous had she ended her column with the two previous sentences: “I was angry when I learned about the crimes on Kauai. Someone should have told me not to go alone to Polihale Beach.”

BOB ARLOW Thousand Oaks