The work to understand our common humanity
I wish to comment on the well written letter from JoAnn Blatchley of the St Paul-Nagasaki Sister City Committee. I found myself reflecting on my 40-year experience at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center as a therapist to World War II veterans in the Mental Health Section. I believe there are very few of us (veterans or therapists) left. When one reads news articles from that wartime period it is always in terms of “Japs or Nips” often followed by picture cartoons of Japanese with ugly faces, buck teeth and bayonets. There was seldom a sense of humanity. It would have been very difficult to describe their humanity when one considers their history in China, Korea, the Phillipines or any other location they invaded. Just this last week i shared my experiences of American POWs of the Japanese with a group i meet with regularly and their belief that they would all expect to die at the hands of the Japanese, but their main hope was to have a “peaceful death” and, for instance, did not want to be burned to death.
There are so many ethical, racial and moral questions. In the past my family hosted two groups of Japanese students who spent part of their summer at St. Kate’s, and i think we all found this rewarding.
My unanswered question is not did the Japanese “deserve” the bombing, but rather, with the history we now have, “could we have ended the war without an even greater loss of life without the A bomb?” Just months before the end of the War, almost the entire garrison of 22,000 Japanese on Iwo Jima refused to surrender and went to their deaths presumably still of the belief that their Emperor was some type of god. That belief is very hard to change.
So it is reassuring to learn that there are groups in both countries that work for peace and common understanding of our humanity.
Mike Greeman, Woodbury
Pants on fire
In Sunday’s Pioneer Press there appeared an editorial from the Las Vegas Review Journal repeating certain Republican talking points about the effort led by Pete Buttigieg and the Biden administration to jumpstart the creation of EV charging stations across the country. The assertion is that billions have been spent on a handful of charging stations. A quick internet search puts the lie to this fable: The money was allocated to the states, which were in the process of creating the stations. The effort was just getting started, and the money expenditures were just beginning. The assertion of bureaucratic waste and inefficiency is a pants-on-fire lie. The readers of the Pioneer Press deserve better from Minnesota’s oldest newspaper.
James Watson, Maplewood
Build it, then deal with the problems
Nothing refutes Mohammad Hosseini’s demand for “ethics” and regulations on AI to protect “children, neurodivergent individuals and minorities” than the first paragraph of the EV charger debacle article on the facing page of the paper. It reports that $7.5 billion (yes billion) dollars were spent to build 68 EV chargers. All because of the progressive woke nonsense demanded by the infrastructure act.
Mr. Hosseini would require that we build a whole web of regulations and “ethics” protections around the development of AI. They would do nothing but impede or even strangle the development of AI. Let’s build world-class AI, then see what problems develop and what actions need to be taken to protect people.
William Conway, Vadnais Heights
Wrong state
Utah State Senate President Stuart Adams prompted a change in the age-of-consent law after one of his relatives was charged with having sex with a 13-year-old girl. It appears Jeffry Epstein and his circle of friends’ only mistake was operating in the wrong state.
Joe Danko, North St. Paul
Bite the bullet on Social Security
George Will’s take on what could happen to Social Security and its ramifications to our economy is what could happen if Social Security is not fixed now. To fix it we have to do many things, a few being raise the age of retirement, raise the amount that the employer and employee contribute. Raise the cap on income that is not now subject to Social Security payments. Means-test benefits. If you have an income over $200,000 per year in retirement you do not need it. Except for spouses, if you have not paid in you get nothing back.
This of course will make everyone angry as it will have an impact on everyone. But lawmakers and citizens should bite the bullet and do what needs to be done.
Tom Bates, St. Paul
Give in to a war criminal?
President Donald Trump will meet with invader, child stealer and Ukrainian civilian infrastructure destroyer Vladimir Putin on Aug. 15. He will explore Putin’s willingness for a ceasefire that leads to an end to the war in Ukraine. Pres. Trump has hinted that there will have to be an exchange of land for peace to happen.
Is this the best that America, the defender of freedom against imperial aggression, can do? Is America willing to give in to a war criminal? Is America willing to run from the fight for Ukraine’s democratic freedom? I hope not. If we do, America will look like a chastened puppy for getting in the way of Putin’s plan to rebuild the Russian empire. Pres. Trump likes to play tough, except when he comes up against a real bully. I hope this meeting does not become a replay of Pres. Trump’s meeting with Putin in Iceland in 2018.
Grant Abbott, St. Paul
Who would trust such an agreement?
Who would trust any agreement made by Vladimir Putin and President Trump? They don’t honor their agreements with other countries. These two have already reneged on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances that guaranteed Ukrainian borders and sovereignty. Yet Trump is trying to distract us from his past escapades with convicted sex criminal Epstein by bringing his pal Putin to Alaska to negotiate a “Peace Plan” for Ukraine. Putin is a convicted war criminal from his war on Ukraine, and by international law he should be arrested when he lands in the U.S. But instead, Trump will celebrate him in Alaska.
We all want peace in Ukraine, but there will be no lasting peace unless there is justice for Ukraine from the criminal behavior of Russia. Rather than justice, Trump appears to want a stoppage of the war and is willing to sell out Ukrainian sovereignty over its territory. A comprehensive peace plan would include Ukraine and the European Union in the negotiations. Instead, wanna-be Emperor Trump is meeting with his corruption mentor to carve up Ukraine. Back in 2016, Trump worked through his campaign manager Paul Manafort (since convicted of eight felonies relating to tax and bank fraud) and a Putin operative discussing a corrupt plan to establish “peace” in Ukraine by awarding the Donbas region in Ukraine to Russia for helping Trump win the election. Now in his second term, Trump can help Putin win this region.
What the world needs is a peace process that brings justice to Ukraine.
Chris and Sue Lyons, St. Paul
A path to authoritarianism
The Trump administration is taking our nation down a path to authoritarianism. He is federalizing the police force in Washington, D.C., when violent crime is down 26 percent since 2023. He will be kowtowing to Vladimir Putin in his meeting in Alaska, throwing Ukraine under the bus. Shades of Neville Chamberlain. He has made permanent tax breaks to billionaires like himself. In imposing tariffs averaging 19 percent on other nations, he usurps the power of Congress and will be fueling inflation and increasing the cost of consumer goods for our middle class.
Arthur E. Higinbotham, Northfield
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The ‘real threat to democracy’
A recent letter writer in the Sunday paper thinks Americans should be outraged by the “real threat to democracy” revealed by “recently declassified documents” which he claims prove that “Obama officials” and other Democrats, like Sen. (former Representative) Adam Schiff, created a “false narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.”
I would have thought that the “real threat to democracy” was Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election by spreading the Big Lie that it was stolen from him, by trying to coerce state election officials to change the vote counts, by developing slates of fake electors to be substituted for the real ones and then by organizing an insurrectionist mob to storm the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of the 2020 election results by Congress.
Or I might have thought the“real threat to democracy” is Trump’s present attempts to interfere with the 2026 election by having Texas and other states gerrymander their Congressional districts to guarantee Republican control of Congress for the next three years, if not forever. Or practically every other action taken by Trump since becoming president on Jan. 20.
But ironically, it turns out that the “recently classified documents” which this letter cites are themselves “fake documents and false narratives” that are being propagated by “high level officials in the FBI and CIA”, now under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard is using her current “high public office” platform to propagate a new Big Lie that President Obama was part of a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government.” The goal of this alleged conspiracy, according to Gabbard, “was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup.”
That’s Gabbard’s opinion in her press release which she claims is supported by a “Russian Hoax” memo and a “Report” consisting of 114 pages of mostly redacted assorted memos, emails and other writings from 2016-2018. While this “Report” does generally concern the issue of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election, it is nothing more than hearsay and opinions by government employees about what others are writing and their assessments of these writings.
I found that FactCheck.org conducted its own analysis of Gabbard’s inflammatory claims on July 23, 2025, concluding that Gabbard is “misleading”, that she “distorts the facts” and “relies on a nonexistent contradiction in the 2017 intelligence report.”
Despite its worthlessness as actual evidence admissible to prove any conspiracy, Gabbard’s press release, the “Russian Hoax Memo” and the 114-page “Report” have tremendous value as MAGA propaganda to feed baseless MAGA conspiracy theories and rally the base but also to deflect public attention from the Jeffrey Epstein files.
The “real threat to democracy” is the eagerness of Trump and his lackeys to use false propaganda to divide the American public, undermine the American public’s support for democracy and establish himself as dictator controlling one-party rule.
Jon Erik Kingstad, Oakdale
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