Readers write: Letters to the editor, Jan. 5, 2016

Although crowded and busy, the Town Square area was a friendly venue for folks of all ages, including four of my grandchildren, because everyone seemed to be enjoying the event, watching out for each other and sharing smiles and New Year greetings. Well done!

— Christopher Cooke

Anchorage

In an opinion piece appearing in the ADN on Dec. 26, Victor Davis Hanson takes students, immigrants and the entire “current generation of Americans” to task for whining and ingratitude. Certainly, gratitude is a virtue, where it is appropriate. So is humility, which Hanson also values.

But does anyone else see irony in Hanson’s criticism of President Obama for declining to “remind foreign nations of American singularity?” Traveling the globe expounding on “American exceptionalism” would be a odd act of humility, if you ask me.

— Richard Emanuel

Anchorage

Internationally, 196 countries worldwide signed on in Paris to try, belatedly, to apply the brakes to runaway global warming. Governments across the spectrum from communist to socialist, monarchies, dictatorships and democracies and all of the political divisions and parties therein, (save one, the Republican Party of the U.S.) agree this is a life-or-death turning point for mankind and we are very late to start the turn.

Nationally, we have a ruling party bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry and its corporate allies around the world, a two-headed beast with a D and an R on its foreheads. Castrating and taming this beast, on its suicidal capitalist rampage of endless growth and consumption, fueled by oil and enforced by militarism is the only workable strategy for survival that we have.

In Alaska, the oil, gas and coal industries, headquartered around the world, must ally with us in our immediate conversion to alternative and renewable energy sources, of which we have a surfeit, or face having their corporate charters revoked, a move easily accomplished by firing their employees in Juneau.

Einstein noted that “Because we have the privilege to know we have the duty to act.”

For Alaska to build more fossil fuel infrastructure that will be deathly obsolete before it is finished, dooms us to social poverty and environmental ruin.

Personally, we can resolve this new year to push; as if our lives depend on it, which they do, for the political system we control to act immediately and decisively in implementing this change of course. To all elected officials we say act or resign. Your constituents are not corporations who demand profit but people who need a place for society to survive. Civilization can not be defined in terms of finance.

— William Bartee

Anchorage

Below the fold on the front page of the Dispatch on the day after Christmas, one could read that United States weapons sales rose to $36.2 billion. After having channel-surfed on Christmas Day itself and landing on C-Span where a repeat of the ceremony unveiling the bust of former Vice President Dick Cheney in the marbled halls of Congress was shown, I was forced by these circumstances to reflect on the words of a former president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, as I wish all of us a happy, healthful New Year.

President Eisenhower, in a 1953 speech, said “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat” (F-35 “generic” cost = $178 million; that’s equal to 36 million bushels of wheat at (2015 prices) $5 per bushel).

He continued, “We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.” (With the average price of a single Zumwalt-class destroyer at about $4 billion, that’s roughly 12,000 homes, using current Anchorage prices.)

In a 1961 speech he warned, “Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II. …” And, “… we have been compelled to create a permanent arms industry of vast proportions.” In the next paragraph we are warned to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

I’m glad we have a strong defense, and I admire the men and women who have sacrificed, including the ultimate sacrifice, to keep us free. But do we need to be the world’s biggest arms merchant? Do the armaments industry trade groups have any lobbyists? Does any of the rolling stock and arms used by our currently-defined enemies look familiar?

I am thankful that I can ask these questions without fear of imprisonment, and I am not unaware of the fact that freedom is not free. But the tax man cometh, and that right soon.

— Paul Schwartz

Anchorage