Letters to the Editor | July 8, 2025

The Parker administration, after having given itself hefty raises, is refusing to resume negotiations with District Council 33. The mayor has apparently forgotten the essential work done by this union during COVID-19. These are the same workers we all praised as indispensable during the duration of the pandemic. Wake up, mayor, and do right by the lowest-paid city employees as they strike for fair wages.

Heidi P. George, Philadelphia

I wish to thank Paul L. Newman for his timely essay, “Trump and Hegseth are doing our enemies’ work with their Confederate renaming ruse.”

One clarification that actually proves Newman’s point: It was not “Maj. Gen. Pickett [who] ordered a futile charge at Gettysburg,” it was Robert E. Lee himself. But Newman’s point stands.

In the decades since, Pickett’s Charge, one of the worst tactical blunders of the Civil War, has taken on a life of its own in the enduring myth of the “Lost Cause.” Two popular modern paintings, High Water Mark and The High Tide, commemorate that moment — when many still believe the Confederacy could have dealt a death blow to the Union.

In his 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust, William Faulkner eloquently describes how the myth of that moment lives on “[f]or every Southern boy 14 years old, not once but whenever he wants it ...”

It is this dangerous and enduring myth of the nobility of Confederate treason that the president and the secretary of defense are leveraging to score points in their war on social justice causes in contemporary culture. That our military bases still honor the names of traitors supports historian Heather Cox Richardson’s contention that, in terms of ideology, the South won the Civil War.

David S. Wiedner, Manchester, N.H.

Paul L. Newman’s op-ed criticizing the renaming of Army bases in the South is on the mark. I voted for President Donald Trump three times — and would again — but he missed the mark on this one. I proudly served at Fort Bragg and attended Airborne and Ranger School at Fort Benning. But, if I were Black, I might take offense to serving on a base named after men who did not necessarily have my ancestors’ best interests at heart. I don’t believe bases should be renamed just to meet a racial quota, but there are plenty of heroic men who earned the Medal of Honor whom everyone would support. The Democrats were wrong in the way they went about changing the names, and the Republicans just complicated the issue.

Andy Anderson, Glassboro

How can the U.S. government continue to vacillate on providing critical military support to Ukraine when the country continues to demonstrate — even with less than state-of-the-art weapons — that it can defeat a more powerful Russian army on the battlefield? Why won’t our president and secretary of defense realize that Vladimir Putin will never discuss peace until he realizes he can’t defeat a country that has a better-trained army with higher morale, superior technology, enough weapons, and a commitment to save its sovereignty? If the U.S. would put more punishing sanctions on Russia, Putin might see things differently.

Let’s reinforce our commitment to our decades-long ally, and remember Russia is an adversary of the U.S., NATO, and other European countries.

Robert Turnbull, Media

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