Better Ways to Promote AIDS Awareness

Re “Latinos at Odds Over Plan for AIDS Memorial,” Feb. 17: Lincoln Park serves the surrounding Eastside community, a community that greatly needs what a public park provides -- a park where people and families can go to have picnics, let children run and play on the grass, take young children for a walk in a stroller, participate in recreational activities, sit on a bench or lie on the grass and enjoy the park’s natural surroundings.

People go to parks to relieve the stresses of daily life. They don’t go to a park to be confronted by an “expansive” memorial with several panel walls. A memorial of the scope described will, in effect, remove a significant area of the park from its proper use.

Placing an AIDS memorial in a public park is not an effective way to help people who are at risk of contracting AIDS or helping people who are its victims. The money mentioned would be better spent on funding AIDS social services and media campaigns to get important AIDS information into the community.

Al Moggia

Silver Lake

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In expressing opposition to the proposed “The Wall -- Las Memorias” AIDS memorial at Lincoln Park, local resident Hugo Pacheco asks: “And if you’re in the park with your kids, how do you start explaining AIDS to your kids?” Isn’t that just the point? A conversation between parents and children about AIDS could save lives.

Arturo Vargas

Los Angeles