to the editor

The Beacon is a monthly newspaper dedicated to inform, serve, and entertain the citizens of the Greater Baltimore area, and is privately owned. Other editions serve Howard County, Md. and Greater Washington, D.C. Subscriptions are available via third-class mail ($12), prepaid with order. Maryland residents add 6 percent for sales tax. Send subscription order to the office listed below. Publication of advertising contained herein does not necessarily constitute endorsement. Signed columns represent the opinions of the writers, and not necessarily the opinion of the publisher.

Publisher/Editor – Stuart P. Rosenthal

President/Associate Publisher – Judith K. Rosenthal

Executive Vice President – Gordon Hasenei

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Dear Editor:

Just read your publisher’s column [“Layers of reality”] in the June Beacon . I’m amazed at all of that!

Every now and then I get into an astronomy kick, which helps place things in perspective, I find. Years ago, I read Coming of Age in the Milky Way and loved the first parts about historic discoveries. But when I got to quantum physics, I was lost.

Then I read The Swerve about how the Greeks decided that all life was made up of atoms! Somehow, we lost something along the way.

Jean Hirons Via email

[murderous regime] began with the banning of ideas and writings and art: A destructive force that created fear of the “other,” dehumanizing and delegitimizing.

Today, individuals in America are [being empowered] to remove literature and poetry from schools. A United States of America that welcomed the oppressed and allowed them to hope, that is the America I swore an oath of allegiance to when I became a naturalized citizen almost two decades ago.

We need to bring back this idea of the hope for a better life here. We need to teach acceptance rather than exclusion, celebrating our diversity rather than creating barriers and bans.

Dear Editor:

Do you know what happened in Germany in the early 1930s?

People decided that certain publications, books dealing with ideas and philosophy, literature and poetry should be burned. Art that was deemed unfit for the “New Germany” was banned, burned or plundered.

It took time and the loss of millions of lives for people to realize the removal of books and art would not stop there. The

By closing the doors to our past, by forcing art and literature and poetry to be removed from schools and colleges, we create ignorance and promote a narrow, myopic view of our world.

Let us not repeat the mistakes made by past despots who feared truth and trampled upon the hopes and aspirations of their people.

Yuvi Krausz Ellicott City