To the Editor:
Re “The Overlooked Truths About Biden’s Age,” by Frank Bruni (Opinion, March 30):
Mr. Bruni was completely proper to level out that the presidency isn’t a one-person job. After we go to the polls in November we’re electing a basic supervisor/captain/coach. His job is then to get the workforce assembled and provide you with a plan. That’s what our government department is about.
The president wants the precise folks below him and round him. Joe Biden put collectively an ideal cupboard and different advisers fairly shortly three and a half years in the past. Seven and a half years in the past, Donald Trump put collectively a band of conniving circus performers.
The nation wants a workforce that can supply help in addition to alternate options and criticism to the president and can hold us all protected “from sea to shining sea.” Let’s not give attention to the velocity of Mr. Biden’s gait or the loudness of his voice. We have to hold our sights set on his sanity and on his psychological talents, that are nonetheless functioning fairly nicely.
Janis Delson
New York
To the Editor:
Like President Biden, I flip 82 this fall. As I think about is true for us each, the steps have gotten steeper, the newsprint smaller, sleep extra interrupted. And, sure, we generally expertise transient reminiscence freezes because the reminiscence bubbles floor extra slowly by means of our mind’s molasses. As fellow previous males, we perceive the distinction between forgetting a reputation and dementia.
But my career — psychological science — paperwork that we octogenarians retain or develop three vital strengths, which, to affirm Frank Bruni, “get too little consideration”:
Crystallized intelligence. Our data and the flexibility to use it crest later in life. Thus many historians, philosophers and artists produce their most noteworthy work in late profession.
Knowledge. With maturity, folks can higher take a number of views, supply sagacity amid conflicts and admire their fallibility. The knowledge to know once we know a factor and when we don’t is born of expertise.
Emotional stability. Because the years go by, our emotions mellow. With age, we discover ourselves much less typically excited, but additionally much less typically depressed. Compliments produce much less elation; criticisms, much less despair.
So, sure, the president will generally misspeak or neglect. However he will even profit from the maturity that allows his navigating the “battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses” (his phrases).
David G. Myers
Holland, Mich.
The author, a Hope School social psychologist, is the writer of “How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Thoughts.”
To the Editor:
Our Structure mandates {that a} president should be no less than 35 years previous. Given the superior ages of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, coupled with rampant dissatisfaction on all sides of the political spectrum, this can be the perfect second to amend the Structure.
If we require a minimal age, why not a most age restrict, maybe 75? Like many older voters, I worth the contributions of our era, nevertheless it’s time to move the torch.
Judith Bishop
New York
To the Editor:
Frank Bruni has it about proper in citing Joe Biden’s constructive presidential attributes and the significance of the workforce round him in defending him towards assaults based mostly on his age. However one of the best summation I’ve heard to date got here from an impartial voter interviewed after voting in a main, who stated, “I’d reasonably vote for a man who has 81 years behind him than a man who has 91 felony costs forward of him” (not too long ago lowered to 88).
David Rubin
Canton, Mass.
Investing in Ukraine
To the Editor:
Re “Speaker Floats Possible Terms for Aid to Kyiv” (entrance web page, April 2):
The U.S. Congress has to know that help for Ukraine is an funding within the freedom and independence of a sovereign nation that was invaded by Russia.
Investing now in victory for Ukraine will keep away from the necessity to spend billions to counter aggression by the autocratic regimes in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, which can see weak point and take steps to take advantage of it.
Ed Houlihan
Ridgewood, N.J.
A Worthy Betrayal by García Márquez’s Sons
To the Editor:
Re “Gabriel García Márquez Wanted His Last Novel to Be Destroyed,” by Álvaro Santana-Acuña (Opinion visitor essay, March 17):
At first, I used to be fast to sentence the sons of Gabriel García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. García Márquez died 10 years in the past, and towards his needs, Rodrigo and Gonzalo have now revealed “Till August.” For disgrace! Such greed!
But I used to be swayed by Mr. Santana-Acuña’s glorious visitor essay. He argues that “Till August” is the “unpolished work of an growing old grasp” and “needs to be learn as such.” He reminds us that Franz Kafka ordered his pal Max Brod to burn his unfinished works — however Brod didn’t: “This betrayal modified the historical past of literature and the lifetime of a younger man who, after studying ‘The Metamorphosis,’ determined to turn out to be a author.”
Certainly, as García Márquez told The Paris Review, when he learn that Gregor Samsa awoke as a huge insect, “I believed to myself that I didn’t know anybody was allowed to jot down issues like that. If I had identified, I might have began writing a very long time in the past.’”
I not too long ago borrowed “Till August” from the library. Within the preface, Rodrigo and Gonzalo query whether or not “the fading schools” that saved their father “from ending the e book additionally saved him from realizing how good it was. In an act of betrayal, we determined to place his readers’ pleasure forward of all different issues. If they’re delighted, it’s doable Gabo may forgive us. In that we belief.”
I for one was delighted to listen to the good author’s voice once more.
Carol Weston
Armonk, N.Y.
Our Gun Tradition and Mass Shootings
To the Editor:
Re “Toxic Gun Culture Begins at Home,” by Elizabeth Spiers (Opinion visitor essay, March 28):
Ms. Spiers writes about “how the Crumbleys’ attitudes and actions replicate an more and more insidious gun tradition that treats weapons as devices of defiance and revolt reasonably than as a method of final resort.”
She was referring to Ethan Crumbley, who shot and killed four students and wounded seven others at Oxford Excessive College in Michigan in 2021, and to his mother and father, Jennifer and James Crumbley, who had been convicted individually of involuntary manslaughter within the bloodbath by their son, then 15 years previous. The Crumbleys had been the primary mother and father in the USA to be straight charged for the deaths attributable to a baby in a mass capturing at a faculty.
As the daddy of two youngsters who survived the Oxford Excessive College capturing, I’ve mirrored fairly often on this tragedy during the last two years and imagine that Ms. Spiers’s essay strikes on the coronary heart of a troublesome fact about our nation’s relationship with weapons.
It’s apparent that the Crumbleys might have taken easy steps to stop this tragedy. It’s true that laws issues and can make a distinction. Nonetheless, the exhausting actuality is that till we come to phrases with these deeply rooted points of gun tradition within the suburbs and exurbs, the place many of those mass shootings happen, we’ll regrettably expertise extra of those tragedies.
George Stoffan
Oxford, Mich.