It's great to have a business owner like Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank promoting Baltimore to outsiders as well as to residents ("Plank says city must lose 'chip on our shoulder,'" Nov. 2).
However, I find it unfortunate that anyone from Baltimore makes excuses for some of the best television ever produced in "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "The Wire."
There are countless shows currently on television about murderers, rapists, drug dealers and child molesters that are based in most of the major cities in the country. Do all of those cities apologize for the content of these shows?
My guess is that they do not. Baltimoreans do have an inferiority complex to be sure, but that didn't just happen recently. One of the main factors for this town being second-rate is its uninspired and almost silly elected leadership, from the mayor on down.
These people keep getting elected with little or no opposition and from only a small percentage of the electorate due to apathy. Baltimore has real and tangible problems that need to be fixed, and the help of corporate partners is indeed needed if not essential.
What the city's corporate sponsors should be doing is not feeding their current elected pets even when they haven't had an original thought in years. Instead they should band together, find and promote people who want to serve and lead this city back to where it should be.
We have been a B-list city with incompetent leadership for far too long.
C.D. Wilmer, Baltimore