Category: Opinion

In the five-county Philadelphia region, nearly 34,000 veterans depend on U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs disability benefits. These benefits are not just a lifeline; they are a powerful economic engine that pumps nearly $955 million into our local economy every year.

But on Oct. 29, the U.S. Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee held a hearing to “reform” the disability system, laying the groundwork to gut this vital support by using a false narrative that targets the very veterans who need it most.

The hearing was built around a proposal by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R., Ala.) to create a commission similar to a Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) procedure to fast-track changes, and by the testimony of one star witness, Daniel Gade.

Gade, a retired Army colonel, professor, and disabilities activist who was badly wounded in Iraq and is now running for a U.S. Senate seat in Virginia, argued that disability benefits “rob veterans of purpose” and that conditions like tinnitus and hypertension should not be compensated.

As a Navy veteran and a medical student, I was alarmed by the medical and data-driven inaccuracies used to justify this attack.

Questioning PTSD

Gade’s claim that PTSD is “curable,” and thus shouldn’t be permanently compensated, is medically false. As any first-year medical student knows, post-traumatic stress disorder is a chronic condition that, at best, can be managed into remission. It is not “cured.”

Gade’s dismissal of hypertension as a “lifestyle” condition is equally dangerous. As the Disabled American Veterans (DAV) has testified, hypertension is scientifically linked to military service and associated with common toxic exposures to Agent Orange and other toxic substances. These conditions are not lifestyle choices; they are the documented, latent wounds of military service.

The entire premise for this “reform” is based on a manufactured narrative of “massive fraud.” This is statistical fiction.

My research at Temple University involves analyzing large medical data sets, and the data here is clear: The fraud narrative is a myth. The DAV’s testimony confirmed that the VA sees “fewer than 200 fraud convictions annually” out of nearly “3 million claims.” That is a fraud conviction rate of less than 1/100th of 1%.

This isn’t just a national story. This rhetoric insults the 33,816 veterans in the Philadelphia region who receive these earned benefits.

If the committee truly wants to find waste, it should focus on real problems, which were detailed by the VA’s own watchdogs at the same hearing.

VA Inspector General Cheryl L. Mason focused her testimony on the real issue: predatory “claim sharks” and systemic management challenges, as outlined in an inspector general’s report on the Philadelphia office. The VA’s own data show its problems are internal, not with the veterans it serves.

Dangerous distraction

In other words, the “veteran fraud” narrative is a dangerous distraction from the real problem: a broken VA disability system. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) agreed, confirming that the system has been on its “High Risk List” since 2003 due to “longstanding challenges” concerning oversight and training.

This is where reform is needed. Don’t misplace blame on veterans for the VA’s own systemic failures.

While Sens. Dave McCormick and John Fetterman do not sit on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, the financial stability of over 33,000 of their constituents, and nearly a billion dollars in our local economy, is on the line.

I urge them to publicly oppose this dangerous commission and demand Congress focus on the real problems: cracking down on the claim sharks who prey on veterans, and fixing the VA management failures the watchdogs have identified for decades.

Alyster Alcudia is a U.S. Navy veteran, a former nuclear submarine warfare officer, and a medical student in Philadelphia.

It’s suddenly December, and the Thanksgiving leftovers are mostly eaten. That means it’s once again time to make the big decision: Is this the year to finally stop sending holiday cards?

When I graduated from college, I promptly embraced the trappings of adult life, from getting a job to buying a car to moving into my own apartment. But the step that made me feel most adultlike was sending out my own holiday cards. A holiday card from a separate address says: “This is my household. Not my parents’ household, mine.”

Not cheap

Sending holiday cards isn’t cheap.

There are the cards themselves, which go up in price if you’re sending a photo card or selecting fancy lined envelopes. Stamps are currently 78 cents apiece, which doesn’t sound like much, unless you’re sending out 50 cards or more.

And then there’s the issue of time: You have to decide on the cards and purchase them, write a little note in each card, address the envelopes, then make your way to the post office.

Yet, despite the costs in money and time, I’ve always sent out cards, even in my younger, poorer years. There has always been a satisfaction in reaching out to people I don’t see regularly, but who nevertheless have a place in my heart and my history.

Then, about 10 years ago, I realized we were receiving fewer cards each year.

The clogged mailbox became progressively emptier over a span of years, like a dying mall. This shift shows up in statistics from the U.S. Postal Service, which notes that mail bearing postage stamps, including cards, letters, and bill payments, dropped from 16.5 billion pieces of mail in 2019 to 10.7 billion last year.

For the first few years, I worried the non-senders were going through challenging times. A person doesn’t feel very merry if they’ve gotten divorced or been laid off or had a death in the family. But it turned out that — fortunately — very few had faced hardship. They just weren’t sending cards anymore.

“It’s a lot of trouble,” said one. “I don’t have the time,” said another.

And then we got to what seemed to be the real issue: Society has changed.

People who used to send holiday cards can now share photos online of their family and their travels. Because they’re regularly connecting with those far-flung cousins and high school friends on social media, mailing out cards has become redundant and maybe even pointless to them.

And people today feel less obligated to reciprocate than those from a generation ago, according to research conducted by Brian P. Meier, a psychology professor at Gettysburg College.

Keeping the tradition alive

The young adults in my life, including my own grown children, who are now in their 30s, haven’t just decided against sending cards; the idea never occurred to them in the first place.

So once again, at this time of year, I consider whether to keep the tradition going. But there are several relatives who are not on social media, and there are a few longtime friends I’m in touch with only through holiday cards.

It’s a poignant yearly ritual to go over the list of recipients, noting who has moved, who has married, who has had a baby, and who has passed away. People come and people go, and nothing underscores this quite like the holiday card list.

Better to let them know they’re loved, right now.

So I will get to the task, laying cards and envelopes neatly on the kitchen table. My husband will look at me blankly.

“Are we still doing that?” he’ll ask.

Elizabeth Luciano writes essays and fiction and teaches composition at Bucks County Community College.

One day, an English teacher at my gigantic public high school in Manhattan paused the lesson.

He placed his hands shoulder-width apart on his ancient desk. He hooked his toes on the rim of the chalkboard behind him, and there he was: suspended in the air, floating above the sullen earth toward the end of third period on a dismal November day.

“Have you ever seen anyone do this before?” he asked.

He looked around from his perch, mischievous joy sparkling in his eyes beneath his mop of white hair. He held the pose, and then the period bell rang.

That the teacher happened to be Frank McCourt, who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for his memoir Angela’s Ashes, is only partly relevant. Mr. McCourt was celebrating the weirdness and joy of being human, the possibility and story in every moment.

Messing with our heads

And, like all good artists, he was messing with our heads to pop us out of our usual selves, into the realms of creativity and new thought that have always moved civilizations forward.

For a teenager unhappy to be in school at all, he was a welcome light.

The Portland Frog reminded me of that moment, now 40 years ago, the way it stood there with its belly out like a 3-year-old asking for cookies, and the unbelievable, cowboy-laconic toughness the suit’s occupant expressed after an ICE agent pepper-sprayed his vent hole: “I’ve definitely had spicier tamales.”

Contrast this great fun to today’s singularly humorless White House, as best exemplified by press secretary Karoline Leavitt. In a recent exchange, a reporter inquired about the significance of a Putin-Trump summit meeting proposed for Budapest, Hungary. Why there? In 1994, that’s where Russia promised not to invade Ukraine if that country gave up its nuclear weapons.

Leavitt responded with a string of insults. But the question was actually interesting and thoughtful: It would have been more fun to mull its implications than to be a jerk.

Used to be funny

Deranged as Donald Trump is, he has always been funny. But even that modestly redeeming trait seems gone in this bleakly self-serious White House. If I were an autocrat in training, I’d be worried about that, on durability grounds.

The late anthropologist David Graeber and the archeologist David Wengrow are known for rethinking early human history in a way that credits Neolithic peoples with intelligence and whimsy. In the spirit of the Portland Frog or Mr. McCourt, early humans may have initially avoided labor-intensive agriculture because they had other things to do, including storytelling, masquerades, or traveling. Maybe early signs of trade were not nascent capitalism, they argue, but the result of vision quests, or of women gambling.

Our best human projects survive because they are aspirational, offbeat, and fun. Early democracy in the U.S. was certainly colored by those qualities. When an exhausted John Adams arrived in Philadelphia for the first Continental Congress, he went straight to a bar — City Tavern. Pursuit of happiness, anyone? And yes, dark projects occur, but they rarely last long.

Visiting my mother recently in that same city of Philadelphia, close to her 88th birthday, I wondered what characteristics lead to a long life and other lasting human projects.

My mom marched in “No Kings” Day. She suggested we visit a unique beer shop with hundreds of ales to get some Thai beer to pair with our meal. And perhaps, she also offered, you would like to attend the euphonium concert I’m hosting tomorrow night?

Helping her declutter her storage closet, I held up a Chock full o’Nuts coffee can. “What are we doing with this?” I asked. “I was saving it because it had the twin towers on it … It might be valuable.”

Indeed, the can featured the skyline of my youth. “It’s art,” I said. “We’ll keep it,” placing it on a shelf for display, an Arabica-scented monument to a city as it once was, still a place of joy and loss and resilience.

Photos from within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers show a contrasting vision of the city: pictures of humans in distress, put upon by violent, masked, monstrous agents. The victims’ faces were a panoply of the diversity of the American experience. Perhaps some were vicious criminals, but most seemed to be moms, children, or laborers.

If they were really Tren de Aragua, would they be crying?

In the contrast between that dungeon and my mom’s happiness project, I caught a glimpse of the reason our country has endured and thrived, even despite many imperfections.

We’ve ultimately rewarded, and been rewarded by, entrepreneurial joy, and those projects have often succeeded: the World’s Fairs, the National Parks, the Eagles.

The purveyors of darkness just aren’t that compelling to those of us who aspire to a measure of glee and wonder in our brief days and years.

That quality may not be enough to save us now, but it’s a force, for certain, to be reckoned with.

Auden Schendler is the author of the book “Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul.”

While those of us concerned about the future of our nation’s scientific institutions and safety net feel distraught without a way to protect them, we doomscroll and spiral out further. Yet, it is in that doomscrolling that a solution may lie.

Why are we giving away our attention to plutocrats, for free, when we could be investing it in the direction of the common good?

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, made over $160 billion in advertising revenue last year, largely generated by our clicks, our scrolling, and the algorithms that entrap us and, too often, damage our children’s mental health.

That $160 billion flowed into a corporate machine with a primary duty to its shareholders, not to the public.

Gutting research

Meanwhile, the federal government canceled $8 billion in research grants to more than 600 colleges and universities through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. And that was just in the first six months of the second Trump administration. That’s a mere 5% of Meta’s profits.

And while an exact figure for Donald Trump’s contested cuts to nonprofits remains elusive, he did try to cut $400 million from AmeriCorps, and tried to claw back $49 million in aid to the lawyers representing abused and neglected children. The nonprofit sector stands to lose even more if the president’s budget reinforces changes to the tax code.

That’s the bad news.

But we believe these catastrophic losses to research and charity can be turned into wins. We believe it is time to rewrite the social contract of social media.

Imagine a nonprofit social media platform run with input from universities, nonprofits, and research institutions — a competitor to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X — where every dollar from advertising and sponsorship supports charitable missions and research.

The model is radical in its simplicity: users engage much as they do now, advertisers pay to reach them, sponsors chip in, and instead of profits accruing to billionaires, the revenue stream funds scientific research and humanitarian programs.

You like cat videos? Great — so do the researchers fighting pediatric cancer that your ad clicks just helped fund. Need a dopamine rush from someone liking a picture of your sandwich? So does the charity furnishing apartments for unhoused people. Why cede the attention economy entirely to the for-profit sector?

Imagine if even a fraction of Meta’s $160 billion in ad revenue were redirected into research into Alzheimer’s and other diseases. On a new social media platform, users could earmark the revenue they generate for particular causes or research institutions.

Critics will scoff: “You can’t compete with Facebook.” But Myspace once seemed unassailable. TikTok rose from nowhere to global dominance in under five years.

Attention is fickle. Platforms age. Generations shift. And when they do, new players emerge — players who can ride the next wave of interface design, AI integration, and community-driven features.

It doesn’t have to be this way

We can keep sending our collective attention and data into the coffers of corporations that owe us nothing, amplify misinformation, sow division to drive engagement, and knowingly ensnare our children’s attention spans in damaging ways.

Or, starting small but growing with time, we can build an economic engine designed with community input and guardrails to serve the public good.

Ours is not a utopian dream.

The infrastructure exists. The advertising market is there, especially among small local businesses and nonprofits. We don’t know yet what innovative features the platform can offer, but the human desire to connect online isn’t going anywhere. The only missing piece is the will to claim a piece of that market for purposes nobler than quarterly earnings.

The call here is straightforward: Help us build our social media platform, CommonLoop. We are starting off as a lawyer and a journalist with an email account, seeking an anchor sponsor and early participants.

If you’re a university president, a nonprofit director, a philanthropist, or simply someone with the resources and skills to help launch such a platform — now is the time. The start-up costs are real, but so is the prize: a self-sustaining system that turns the most lucrative business model of the digital age into a public trust.

Click, scroll, like — but this time, make it count.

Eric Jepeal is an attorney in higher education. Tina Kelley is a journalist and coauthor of “Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope.”