Letters to the Editor | Dec. 29, 2022

Elon Musk’s raucous tenure at Twitter offers a lesson for us all. As a technology whiz, Musk had the discretion to pursue his creations, for better or worse, without responsibility for the resulting upheavals. So at Tesla, he revolutionized the auto industry like no one since Henry Ford — a largely beneficial innovation, but one leaving to others the task of its many ramifications. At SpaceX, he has been able to launch an unfettered number of communication satellites, thereby altering the nighttime sky for everyone in the world with nobody’s permission. But, as he considers resigning as Twitter’s trainwreck CEO, he has apparently realized that the hubris he gathered as a tech entrepreneur didn’t give him the wisdom or training to govern in the political or social spheres. (Mark Zuckerberg is having a comparable experience.) One lesson, I think, is that going forward, the teaching of civics, history, literature, foreign languages and cultures, and other social studies are just as important as STEM subjects and that students who struggle with the latter should not thereby be excluded from advancing their pursuit of higher education on an equal basis. Society will always produce technological leaps, and these, within ethical boundaries, should be unencumbered. But as history has sadly shown, we often don’t know how best to use them.

Stephen G. Young, Cherry Hill

The House Jan. 6 committee has released its final report and voters mostly pushed back against election deniers in the 2022 midterms. But is democracy any safer? Are we to believe the dozens of committee witnesses who invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination will not plot again? As Donald Trump once said, people taking the Fifth are mobsters, hiding something, and are probably guilty, or they would answer the questions. Are we to believe the ultra-monied power brokers who funded the attempted coup are giving up? We know that some of the very same coup members still sit in our Congress, ignoring subpoenas and likely biding their time for yet another opportunity to try and steal an election. The public should know who they are. While names such as Michael Flynn, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, Jeffrey Clark, etc., have become household names, there are scores of lesser lights not known to the general public unless you google the information. We have 30 days until the GOP takes the House to get this vital work done.

William Cohen, Huntingdon Valley, athomebill@comcast.net

While listening to President Volodymyr Zelensky speak to the U.S. Congress, I was struck by the similarities between Ukraine’s current struggle against Russia and our country’s own struggle against the British monarchy. Both were/are political entities struggling for self-governance against a militarily superior political state which sought/seeks to impose their will and way of life on an independent populace. Some Republican politicians have spoken up against aid to Ukraine in its time of need. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin sought help from our French and Polish allies, who responded in defense of a new nation. Without that help, we might not have prevailed. I would ask those Republican politicians, what is the price of freedom? How many lives were lost and how many dollars spent during the two World Wars? An attack on any sovereign state is an attack on all sovereign states, as dictators never stop at one victory; read history. Germany didn’t stop at Poland, Japan didn’t stop at the Pacific islands, Russia didn’t stop at Crimea. Let us not put a price tag on freedom. Whatever it takes is worth it.

James Seyboldt, Warminster

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