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Patti Davis’s Reflections on Joe Biden and Her Dad, Ronald Reagan
More from our inbox: A Peaceful Jan. 6, Unlike Four Years AgoThe Palestinians’ FutureMind-Altering DrugsCredit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor: Re “Biden and the Messiness of Being Human,” by Patti Davis (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 30 …
More from our inbox:
- A Peaceful Jan. 6, Unlike Four Years Ago
- The Palestinians’ Future
- Mind-Altering Drugs
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
To the Editor:
Re “Biden and the Messiness of Being Human,” by Patti Davis (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 30):
In America, we still often refuse to acknowledge that aging and death are inevitable. As long as we continue to insist that we are “just fine,” and of course we will have good days and bad days, we do ourselves an enormous disservice because we don’t plan for what happens as our capabilities diminish, not to mention what happens after we’re dead.
In the case of President Biden, this denial has put our entire country, and by extension the world, in jeopardy. I have a hard time feeling compassion for Mr. Biden and his “handlers” under these circumstances, and I’m trained in the art of gentleness and compassion.
While I personally wish Mr. Biden all the best, I am mad at him, too. He has done our country an enormous disservice.
Mitzi Schwarz
Los Angeles
The writer is a hospice chaplain and a cantor.
To the Editor:
Patti Davis’s essay about President Biden was so sensitive and so beautifully written that I felt tears welling up within me as I read it. I am a Biden admirer, but have been churned up by his denial of the realities of his situation — and even more so by the apparent blindness of his family relative to what seems to me a clearly accelerating decline in his mental acuity and his physical stamina. Patti’s words make me more empathetic.
Suzanne Farnham
Baltimore
To the Editor:
I don’t blame President Biden. He’s behaving normally for someone declining as he ages. I blame journalists for not investigating the rumors, which were well known, about his decline.
The media chose to cover these rumors as G.O.P. smears and/or excuse him as just a kindly older gentleman who has minor memory lapses. This portrayal effectively hid his decline from Americans, who relied on the media to inform them honestly.
