It saddened me to see Elliott Epstein devote so much energy and column space to bashing Bernie Sanders and his now suspended presidential campaign. I am a Baby Boomer and an ardent supporter of Sanders. I tire of the baiting rhetoric of “radical!” “socialist!” “train wreck!”

Anyone living in the United States during this pandemic, watching neighbors being turned away from life-saving testing for lack of the proper health insurance (which they lost with their job), has a front row seat to a train wreck. We have elected a catastrophically ignorant, corrupt and rapacious capitalist and watched his party — including Maine’s own Sen. Susan Collins — rally around the tax cuts for the wealthy that only widen the immoral universe of haves and have-nots.

The train wreck is already here.

I am glad for voices like those of Bernie Sanders who call out the larger social inequities that are revealed in such events. I yearn for a leader who appeals to our shared participation in sustaining a society that is equitable for all. Trump and his preoccupation with the plight of billionaires at the expense of people’s physical health and welfare says it all: train wreck.

Epstein and his old saw of radical socialism seems disingenuous, especially now. Denmark, and its higher tax rates that he decries, rates as one of the happiest nations in the world, based largely on satisfaction with the issues that Sanders advocates: education, health care, and shared responsibility. Doesn’t sound like a train wreck to me.

Kirk Read, Auburn