Letters: Don’t mess with the PA Constitution; Current events bring shame on blue planet
Don’t mess with the PA Constitution
The leadership of the PA House of Representatives is continuing to try to sneak in a constitutional amendment (House Bill 38) that would end statewide elections for appellate judges in favor of races in districts drawn by the legislature. These districts could be gerrymandered to favor one party.
A judges’ role is not to represent constituents, but to adjudicate cases according to state law. It is bad enough that, in PA, judges must run for office in partisan elections, but this proposed bill would make judges even more beholden to politicians of the party that drew the judicial district maps.
This bill already passed the General Assembly once, in the previous session (as HB-196), so that, if it passes again in this session by Feb. 17, it will be a ballot question in the May primary election. Turnout in primary elections is abysmally low, and voters seldom reject any constitutional amendment.
Contact your representative and tell them to oppose HB-38.
Current events bring shame on blue planet
In the Sunday CDT, I read about the wretched monkeys from the beautiful island of Mauritius, on the way to their doom as lab experiments, getting one last gasp of freedom when their transport crashes in freezing Pennsylvania. I see that the Doomsday clock stands at 100 minutes to midnight and the war in Yemen grinds on, as yet another massive airstrike wipes out a prison in this starving, ruined country. I hardly notice, as my attention is drawn to the looming war in Ukraine.
It makes me remember Carl Sagan’s book “Pale Blue Dot,” inspired by the Voyager spacecraft’s photograph as it set off for the edges of the universe. Our world is a tiny shimmering speck in the vast dark cosmos — the only planet we know that supports life.
“That’s home,” Sagan wrote, “That’s us. That’s everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
All of us should study that photograph and be ashamed.
More questions after PSU football season
After the 2021 football season, a number of questions should be asked. Based on the season’s results, how is it possible that our coach was offered a ten-year extension? Why did our Lions looks so bad against other Big Ten teams? In comparison to other coaches on the same fields, why did many of us question our coach’s decision making? Why does it seem that more and more PSU players are transferring to other schools? And, the last question: Is this a trend? Something tells me that similar questions have been raised lately. We would like some answers.
Beware of America’s ‘family of demons’
In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council demanded that Jews and Muslims be set apart from Christians. England complied by demanding that Jews wear a badge on their chests. In 1290, England drove Jews out the country, thus becoming the world’s first racist state.
During the second half of that century Europeans in the Latin West became enamored with the whiteness of their skin. Thus, the Europeans who came to America, including Christopher Columbus, were white supremacists — although largely outcasts and losers in their native lands.
Smug in their white supremacy, Europeans in America used violence to steal land from “inferior” Native Americans, and labor from “inferior” African slaves. They passed laws to protect the massive amounts of unearned wealth they stole. Anxious about becoming slaves themselves, they freed themselves from King George, but also from the handful of talented Americans who gave them their freedom, their Declaration of Independence and their racist Constitution.
Rather than elect such “betters,” they opted for practical businessmen. Thus, these former European losers degenerated further into a cultural backwater as losers in the East moved west across the country. According to Nancy Isenberg, an entire class called “white trash” emerged. They constitute much of what Anatol Lieven called the “family of demons” who occupied the cellar of America’s “splendid and welcoming house.”
These demons came out of the cellar with the fluke election of a thoroughly ugly loser, Donald Trump — and they refuse to go back. Aren’t they the apotheosis of “American exceptionalism?”