Letters to the editor

Push back the retirement age?

Bruce Bartlett’s Wednesday Commentary column, “Setting a realistic retirement age,” presents an acceptable view of the need for a change in the retirement age for Social Security. I am in favor of it, but there is one big hitch as I see it.

The success of this venture relies on the opportunity for folks to continue to work past 65 years of age. Until the corporate world realizes that a person should not be relegated to the old folks home after age 45, this will not work.

Fortunately, there are some opportunities for older people. I am 78 years old and work every day because I am able to do what my employer needs. At age 65, I had just completed three years in Indonesia and five years in Saudi Arabia in the construction business and was considered valuable. I then was asked to return to Saudi Arabia by a major company. What is sad about this is that not too many companies are willing to hire and keep people past age 45 to 50.

The volunteer organization called 40 Plus is thriving, attempting to place folks of “retirement age.” Only employers can put it out of business — by recognizing that experience, ability and loyalty trump age. Otherwise, it is folly to raise the retirement age and leave seniors without Social Security, unemployed and unable to support themselves.

JACK DORWIN

Livingston, Texas

Islamists in Bangladesh

With reference to Bangladesh Foreign Minister M. Morshed Khan’s interview (?Official links nation’s stability to women’s rights,? World, Wednesday), I commend Mr. Khan’s stout defense of his government’s noticeable achievements in several social sectors.

What was missing, understandably, was the minister’s refusal to acknowledge the literally deadly effect that the increasingly powerful Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh party, a partner in Mr. Khan’s coalition government, is having on Bangladesh’s polity. Since the current government came to office in the fall of 2001, scores of prominent members of the secular intelligentsia have been killed, hundreds injured, many exiled and a few jailed. The same shadowy perpetrators of these heinous acts, emboldened by official silence, continue to wage a terror campaign of bombings against the icons of secular Bengali culture: tombs of Sufi mystics, drama theaters and college cinema shows.

It is little wonder that my original homeland, where Mr. Khan’s democratic government rules by appeasing Islamist militants, has been placed on a watch list by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

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