This letter is in reference to the March 22 editorial: “We should cancel the Seneca preferences now.”

Frank Parlato Jr., a businessman, thinks the Seneca nation has obtained an unfair advantage over him and other “taxpaying” businessmen. He blames two things primarily: Albany and the Liberals for promoting the idea of “reparations” for past wrongdoings to minorities.

I blame businessmen, promoters of capitalism and the “American way.” Why? Do yo think that these “taxpaying” businessmen would have said one word about bringing gambling to this city if they, in the end, were the final benefactors? As a matter of fact, much of the pro-gambling rhetoric that finally convinced Albany to bring gambling to Niagara Falls was from people promoting the idea of an enhanced business environment for them or at least a trickle down (Republican, Conservative concept) to them.

I disagreed with that at the time. I was probably doing some of that “obnoxious” thinking Liberals do about the poor and “stupid” people who would pay the price ultimately, no matter if the benefactor was an Indian or a “taxpaying” businessman. They pushed that kind of Liberal “crap” out of the way, telling us we wee standing in the way of progress.

Please notice Parlato’s embrace of the Liberal concern that the poor and “stupid” would be paying the biggest price now. That’s new to the businessman’s agenda now that he seems to be reaping no benefit from the poor and “stupid” himself. They have modified it a bit from the Liberals by thoroughly describing them as the degenerates that they think they are as in Parlato’s description of the people targeted by “the grind” as being “grotesquely unlearned,” i.e., “stupid,” which I will forever put in quotes when speaking about this stereotype.

The Liberal defense of the poor is now a Republican defense in which they, at once, denigrate the poor for washing over this city in unholy masses and defend them as the ultimate losers of gambling.

Is Albany (our elected officials, not the Indians) to blame as Parlato says? Yes, but the idea was brought to Albany by Hisilk with the thought they, too, would benefit. In fact, the only reason this “cash cow” was presented to the Indians and not the “taxpaying” businessman directly was because they could not find a way to circumvent the good people of New York who would not hand over the right to gamble to them in the first place. They tried, oh they tried!

In the back door comes the Indian on a legislator’s training leash to get around the will of the people of New York, offering what they thought of as the equivalent of beads for the Island of Manhattan. Done deal. We would have our thriving gambling town with the precious milk of greed going down everyone’s throat. Oops! Somebody didn’t make it to the old milk bottle.

Yes, Albany is responsible. No, the Liberals and Reparations are not. No, the Indian is not. Yes, you are, Mr. Businessman.

By the way, I don’t care how it got there, but that new building downtown is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen rise from the doings of man on the good earth of Niagara Falls.

Carol Crown is a Niagara Falls resident.