Bennett achieved a cartoonist's goal
Based on the letters from your readers objecting to Clay Bennett's recent cartoon depicting a funeral home, it appears that he's doing an excellent job.
He's achieving the goal that editorial cartoonists set out to do - challenge, provoke, inspire, stir, and even exasperate.
Long may Clay live and work at his job because there aren't many around today who are so incisive in exposing the foibles of humankind.
Joe Porter, Sewanee, Tennessee
Safeguard Social Security with targeted tax change
Thanks for the excellent Nancy Altman commentary on the threat of payroll tax cuts to Social Security. Social Security and Medicare are essential American programs that protect millions of seniors and children from terrible poverty and illness.
Nearly all of us have relatives or friends for whom quality of life was made at least bearable by these programs.
Sadly, funding for Social Security will not be enough to supply full benefits in a decade or so.
However, funding can be largely restored by removing the upper income limit (roughly $130,000) on the payroll tax to help ensure that Social Security gets funded for the next generation.
Gary Furman, Rossville, Georgia
Planet 'needs a new language of hope'
Let us remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2020.
How do we balance the need for weapons with the necessity for action concerning world hunger? How do we understand the images of destruction from burned and decimated flesh at Hiroshima with the shrinking, stunted flesh of children in Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan?
Isn't it time for enemies to negotiate? What does it mean when the head of the World Food Program warns that world famine could reach "biblical proportions." Is there still space in the soul to "hunger and thirst after righteousness"? Or has greed made us deaf to Jesus: "Feed my sheep"?
Maybe the COVID pandemic has made us dull to body counts. Because the two atomic bombs cremated many civilians, the number killed is inaccurate. As the administration requests $44 billion to modernize nuclear delivery systems, now is the time to deliver food aid to dying countries.
Countries with nuclear arsenals need conversion and conversation to feed those broken by war and climate change. The planet needs a new language of hope.
It is time to change the nuclear umbrella for the umbrella of environmental justice. Breath is a human right.
Kemmer Anderson
Don't you fall for manipulated ads
Please make your voting decisions based on facts, not on campaign ads with altered video or audio content to provoke a subconscious response.
For example, a David Perdue ad run against candidate Jon Ossoff for Senate in Georgia, where his features were altered to make him look more Jewish (Perdue's response: Picture was "accidentally" Photoshopped); or a Lindsey Graham ad run against Jamie Harrison in South Carolina, where he was made to appear blacker than he really is (Graham campaign said it was an "artistic effect"); or ads run against Joe Biden, which change the backgrounds in the pictures in an effort to make him look: "Alone. Hiding. Diminished."
We tend to believe what we see or hear. If campaigns are willing to post or condone subtle fake ads now, how deceitful will they become in October?
During this election, corrupt campaigns may use technology to go from subtle distortions to flagrantly fraudulent videos or audios. Technology, and the willingness to use it deceitfully, puts our democracy more at stake than it has been since 1861.
We cannot assume our democracy is immune to such threats. Fact-check what you see and hear. Do not let yourselves be manipulated.
Tom Walker