Letters to the Editor | Nov. 1 , 2023

SEPTA bus driver Bernard Gribbin drove his final route on Thursday. As I rode many SEPTA buses, I offered my sincere condolences to each driver at the loss of their coworker. As they thanked me, the grief on their faces was profound and showed how deeply and personally affected they were by Gribbin’s death. Yet they had to continue driving, pushing through their sadness, and getting the job done — just as Gribbin set out to do every day. My deepest condolences to the family, friends, coworkers, and passengers whose lives were touched by Bernard Gribbin. The least I can do to respect his memory and to honor those drivers, conductors, and operators is to say “Thank you!” each and every time that I exit any of SEPTA’s modes of transportation, while always remembering that I can get off at any stop if I feel even the slightest bit uncomfortable — they can’t.

Anne Pannone, Philadelphia

An immediate cease-fire is urgent in the war between Israel and Gaza. We all need to pressure our politicians to put an end to this mayhem out of respect for human lives and the opinion of the majority of Americans. A recent survey by Data Progress found that 66% favored a cease-fire. After 25 days of war, the death toll is approaching 10,000 — some 8,300 Palestinians and 1,400 Israelis — one victim every four minutes, and almost exclusively Palestinian after Day One. Every minute this continues creates more hatred and rage, making it ever more difficult to achieve a minimum of peace and reconciliation. The responsibility of the U.S. in the ongoing disaster is immense. Israelis and Palestinians are all suffering the consequences of the failure of decades of American-led efforts to address the root causes of the conflict, which include Israel’s illegal occupation, land confiscations, settlements, and human rights violations. If the causes of conflict are not addressed, there is little hope for peace, security, and dignity for anyone.

Hans Lofgren, Swarthmore

Reading Will Bunch’s column brought to mind a Yogi Berra quote: “The future ain’t what it used to be.” How prescient. Every presidential race gets touted as the most important in history. The 2024 race — with the strong possibility that Donald Trump could be reelected — is the difference between democracy and fascism. Trump has already promised to sidestep the Constitution whenever it suits him. He could push to expand the U.S. Supreme Court, making it possible to strip away what few rights we have remaining. The GOP choosing Mike Johnson as the speaker of the House is one more step into a future that ain’t what it used to be.

Joel Esterman, Havertown, esterman105@verizon.net

Amy S. Rosenberg’s recent story (“New Jersey’s whales now part of a heated political debate”) is so important. As is being widely reported, right-wing climate denial groups are actively assisting in the campaign to kill New Jersey’s wind energy plans, using the tried-and-true delaying tactic of seeking “more studies.” It’s one thing to be against windmills for aesthetic reasons; it’s another to use whales as cover for your pro-petroleum politics. Let’s face it, whales are dying now from being dragged under by nets and struck by boats, but these groups rarely seek solutions here. What we do know from the long-settled science of climate change is the oceans are rising and warming temperatures will compromise the food sources whales desperately need. Only inaction will kill whales.

Mike Weilbacher, Merion Station, mike@mikeweilbacher.com

Matt Sullivan’s op-ed about the safety of kids on Halloween had many excellent ideas for improving pedestrian safety. As someone who frequently travels by the Paoli-Malvern SEPTA rail line to the city, I agree with every one of his suggestions. However, he approaches the problem with an all-too-common bias against drivers. Using rhetoric like “children killed by drivers” is hardly the way to solve the problem. I visited Gothenburg, Sweden, recently and was greeted by a city whose traffic environment is wholly different from Philadelphia’s. The streets are dominated by pedestrians, streetcars, and buses, with hardly any cars. This is the result of the layout of European cities without surrounding vast suburbs.

Vision Zero comes from Sweden, and while it contains some valuable traffic engineering, seeking to adopt it in American cities rather than intelligently and flexibly adapting it to the actual needs of the various street users and to our concepts of liability and responsibility is wrong. Taking extreme positions about traffic issues is one of the biggest reasons for resistance to productive change in Philadelphia.

While Halloween, involving mostly children in the dark, is a special case, the fact remains that a driver going 20 mph who can’t stop for an unsupervised child in black who darts out from behind an object in the road hardly bears primary responsibility for the event. Until Vision Zero includes public education including the publication of a full report on every car-pedestrian or car-bike crash that occurs in Philadelphia — so people on both sides can improve their behavior — we will never get to zero.

John Baxter, Toano, Va., jmbaxt@aol.com

Civilians killed by police and police killed by civilians. One thing all reasonable people should agree on is that any loss of life in a violent manner is deserving of consideration, investigation, and, if a crime was committed, adjudication. The senseless murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Richard Mendez is being investigated, and those who committed the heinous act must spend the rest of their lives in prison cells. Likewise, the equally tragic killing of Eddie Irizarry deserves no less consideration.

Both tragedies involve people whose lives ended prematurely by gunfire, and both have left grieving loved ones to ask how and why and to seek justice from a system that tends to favor institutional authority over individual rights. As (interim) Police Commissioner John M. Stanford Jr. said, at this trying time citizens need to embrace the Philadelphia Police Department and the men and women who do the job of keeping us safe — and embrace them we all should. However, the tragic and criminal murder of Mendez should not in any way obscure or mitigate the tragic and senseless killing of Irizarry. No one innocent lost life is more valuable or deserves more consideration than another innocent lost life.

Mike Dobson, Albrightsville

Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the flood of money into political campaigns has been staggering. Dark money, foreign governments, major donors, millionaires and billionaires, PACs, and Super PACs are financing political campaigns — with the amount of money spent and the identity of who spent it often kept secret. The extraordinary influence of these donors and PACs should be obvious to everyone. The Supreme Court should review the ruling, the corruption it has spawned, the ethical implications, and the international influence it has invited into our electoral system.

There’s also the influence that mass media, social media, and the internet have. For example, billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter so he could control the message and the content. How about billionaire Rupert Murdoch? He owns several news outlets, newspapers, and TV stations. Donald Trump has his own social media site called Truth Social, so he can control his own message. When did Americans lose control of our election system? When did Super PACs and major donors start selecting the candidates we can vote for? How do voters regain control of the campaign finance system, so we can elect the best qualified person for the job, not the best financed?

Patrick Thompson, Media

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