People out and about, on a weekday, are not necessarily unemployed. Many businesses are open evenings and weekends; some go 24-7. This area has two major hospitals, many nursing homes, and a 24-hour Wal-Mart. Recent letters make assumptions about “welfare” based on people standing in line for free ice cream during daytime.

Why begrudge people and their kids a bit of free ice cream that probably would have gotten discarded anyway? Since the 1970s, real wages, relative to inflation, have dropped. Millions of jobs have been outsourced to low-wage countries. More and more, people can’t make ends meet.

It’s surprising how some people can know all about other people’s private financial and employment status, even when they are strangers. I lack such psychic ability. Also, I’m too busy with my own overnight, over-the-weekend work shifts, to dream up uncharitable assumptions about other people’s work or possible welfare status.

About immigrants not being instantly American – they are not even allowed to apply for citizenship until they have been here for at least five years. My maternal great-grandmothers lived all their adult lives in this country but were too busy working and raising huge families to learn much English. America did not collapse because the grandmemes didn’t learn English.

Just because immigrants can’t learn a whole new culture and language in five minutes, is no reason to get all grouchy. Ignorance, narrow-mindedness and bigotry are the real threats to America.

Gail Lucia Richardson, Lewiston