Letters: Build Sites | Social media | Disappointing Lincoln | Growing pension | Wrong side

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Turn momentum
into action on Sites

Re: “Sights set on new reservoir” (Page A1, March 17).

Could it be true? The first major reservoir has been announced since 1979, has federal funding already allocated, does not disrupt river flow and fisheries, and has minimal impact on the surrounding area.

Amid a plethora of intractable problems facing Californians (homelessness, rising housing and energy costs, brazen crime sprees, fire threats, water battles, a railway to nowhere that costs billions upon billions, to name a few) could we have a success story brewing to improve our state? Please, build Sites Reservoir yesterday.

Donald Waters
Pleasant Hill

Pretense of social
media is hurting youth

It is upsetting that in a world of supposed acceptance and diversity, social media continues to be a place of discrimination and unacceptable standards.

Social media has forced people to fake reality, pushing them to share only certain pieces of themselves with the world. I have fallen victim to this lifestyle. Individuals in our society must look or act a certain way to be “accepted.” The content young individuals see scattered among various social media platforms inaccurately displays their reality and as a result, becomes destructive to their growth as humans.

I believe this world must morph into one that accepts individuals for who they are — the real, raw depiction of who they are.

Nikita Bankar
San Ramon

GOP of today would
disappoint Lincoln

I was raised by conservative, Republican parents who understood my decision to serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer in India while JFK was president.

Recently the Republican Party has been scraping the bottom of the barrel for many of its politicians, giving us the worst president in our nation’s history and a majority leader of the Senate who applied the rules for Supreme Court nominees unfairly.

The party’s response to President Biden’s recent State of the Union address by the young senator from Alabama was very disappointing. While wearing a cross as her necklace and with multiple references to God, she seemed to think that Christianity is our country’s national religion. (Hint: google “separation of church and state.”) She also used the outdated Cold War term “the Third World.”

If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, I’m sure he would be ashamed at how the Republican Party has lost its values.

Peter Ross
San Jose

Smart investment
is growing CPP

We regularly read our Social Security system will soon run out of money, and retirement and other benefits will have to be cut. (Exactly when varies with each study, but currently is 2033.) Congress seems unable to find solutions to this problem, which has been known for quite some time.

But to our north, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) isn’t in trouble. The CPP is very much like Social Security: It’s a mandatory program, financed by payroll taxes, half paid by employers and half by employees, and provides retirement, disability and other benefits. The CPP trust fund is growing, not shrinking.

Why is that? Simple — the CPP tax money is invested in a broad mix of investments (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.), while the U.S. payroll taxes are invested only in government bonds, a far more conservative approach.

Are the legislators in Canada smarter than our Congress, or what?

Mike Heller
Walnut Creek

Op-ed poses question
to the wrong side

Re: “Israel becoming much like the empires it historically reviled” (Page A6, March 7).

Steve Koppman lists what are clearly Israeli offenses against Palestinians, and asks: “Is there no point beyond which endless subjugation justifies violence?”

Martin Luther King knew the answer to that question, as did Gandhi, Mandela, and Solidarity in Poland. They sought justice, as many Palestinians and many Israelis do. But Hamas seeks power, not justice. It does not seek the liberation of the Palestinian people, it seeks the destruction of Israel and the death of Israelis.

Oct. 7 was not resistance or liberation. It was murder and rape and kidnapping. No, Mr. Koppman, there is no point beyond which subjugation justifies that kind of violence.

Perhaps a sustained campaign of civil disobedience would advance the cause of Palestinian liberation. Surely it has a better chance than Hamas’ tactics because unlike the British in Palestine, or the French or Americans in Vietnam, the Israelis have no place to go home to.

Merlin Dorfman
Livermore