Letters to the Editor | June 11, 2025

As a 75-year-old Army veteran, I’m confused that the National Guard has been deployed for the protests in Los Angeles, and was not called up by the same person on Jan. 6, 2021, to halt a real insurrection. My fellow citizens, this craziness must stop. I, too, celebrate our Army’s 250th birthday, but millions for a parade? Seems to me the parade is just another reality show that we the people should tune out and wise up to our present reality.

Theodore Suchodolski, Philadelphia

It’s laughable that people are so upset about a supposed cover-up of President Joe Biden and his alleged cognitive decline. Is it true? Maybe. However, I never observed a sharp mental decline. His staff did a great job covering it up, if true. At the end of Biden’s term, inflation, interest rates, and unemployment were down. Wow, what a nightmare. Now, we have a president with very observable cognitive issues. Interest rates and inflation are up, tariffs rise and fall depending on the day. The president seems to believe Biden was assassinated and robotic clones and doubles were running the country. Seriously. No one spoke of Biden’s mental acuity while president until now, when he can’t easily defend himself. Observers throughout the world talk about Donald Trump’s rambling incoherence. I’ll take Biden’s so-called cognitive decline any day over what we now see in the White House.

Gale Carlin, Abington

Did we elect Donald Trump to become Vladimir Putin’s spokesman? Our president has blamed the Ukrainians for starting the war in their country. That’s the Russian position! It is also, of course, a lie. A false statement we might expect from the Donald, but a false statement in support of a Russian murderer and war criminal? Why? What interest of the United States is thereby advanced? Something sinister is going on. Russia is a longtime adversary. And not just in the Cold War. Even in the recent past, we’ve been the target of warlike acts engaged in by the Kremlin. But now we are aligned with them? Not we, of course. Few Americans other than Trump and Republicans too weak to stand up to him bear anything but suspicion toward Putin.

We’ve seen Trump bow before Putin in the past. Remember the joint Trump-Putin appearance in Helsinki when Trump bleated his acceptance of Putin’s assurance of noninterference in the 2016 election over and against the contrary determination of U.S. intelligence agencies? That was a treasonous bow. It’s so bizarre. The admiration of a would-be dictator for an actual one does not suffice to explain the sudden and complete reversal of our relations with Russia. In fact, no satisfactory explanation is available. One might as well conclude that Trump is being blackmailed by Putin. That’s outrageous, yet how else to account for our president’s embrace of the Russian Bear?

Ross Lloyd, West Grove

Kudos to the Philadelphia School District for installing 2,404 water bottle filling stations. The EPA’s action threshold of 15 ppb of lead in drinking water is not a measure of healthfulness; it is an arcane number related to the mechanical degradation of pipes. The EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agree that no amount of lead in a child’s body is safe, and the EPA’s maximum contaminant level goal is 0 ppb. Quite unhelpfully, the goal is unenforceable, and districts around the nation continue to pollute our children with a neurotoxin while erroneously pointing to less than 15 ppb as “safe.” Worse yet, the Pennsylvania state regulation on testing for lead is ill-defined, interpreted by districts, and there is no enforcement. Districts around the state need to take a hard look at Philadelphia’s success in filtering drinking water, and our state legislators need to do their jobs and pass effective legislation to protect schoolchildren from unsafe drinking water.

Chad Baer, Yale executive master of public health candidate, Kennett Square

I support GPS ankle monitors for teens just as I support body cams for police. In both cases, individuals are held accountable for their behavior. Isn’t it better for a youth to have one of these devices on their ankle instead of being incarcerated, especially when considering their future well-being after getting in trouble with the law? So what if tracking data is “turned over to law enforcement agencies without a warrant” during unrelated investigations? If the GPS coordinates show the kid was not anywhere near a crime scene, what’s the problem? This is neither a privacy nor a civil rights issue; it is the greater issue of public safety and dealing with families being unwilling or unable to properly rear their children.

Rosamond Kay, Philadelphia

When the enormous cost of Donald Trump’s presidency is written, his tactics of flattery, his bullying intimidation, and his joy in humiliation will be detailed. As will be his horrifying lack of judgment, like believing a murderer schooled by the KGB can be trusted. And surely the 47th president’s delight in trying to destroy Harvard, our nation’s oldest operating university, founded in 1636, will be a marked step toward public understanding that Trump, not Harvard, is the creator of a dangerously hostile environment.

Harvard has its share of elitists, but unlike our president, the overriding campus motivation is not malicious destruction. When my husband entered his senior year at Harvard, he learned he was a candidate for magna honors. To achieve this, a thesis was necessary. A history major, he painstakingly developed his writing points, making an appointment with an esteemed professor in the Chinese department to share his ideas. Before any discussion, the professor sternly asked if my husband spoke or wrote Chinese. When the answer was no, he was dismissed with these words: “My boy, you can’t do anything worthwhile.”

Long story short: My husband determined he would never again allow his ideas to be demeaned. But mature reflection taught him far more about his condescending professorial dismissal, what all excellent educators expect of their graduates — to push themselves with honor far beyond their very best. Not for themselves, but for the betterment of others, for our world community. And he has.

Understandably, a united Harvard now stands against a president who may well have been rejected by them decades ago — for good reason. Noticeably, at the recent Columbia graduation, acting president Claire Shipman was booed for capitulating to some demands by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Harvard president Alan M. Garber, who in his message defended the value of education, was applauded. One student proudly called out the same two words spoken to my husband in 1957: My boy.

SaraKay Smullens, Philadelphia

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