Let’s read the report: a white oak fell today.

Four hundred years ago the Manahoac

around her, maybe singing but otherwise

without thinking for a second about an ordinary young tree.

Precolonial, present at the founding,

today she fell with a bang,

It sounded, a neighbor said, like a snowball sliding off a roof.

Exhausted, tired of this Great Experiment,

she sank with a sigh, her baleen rods

like a widow in a hoop skirt,

early warning of a republic in danger.

Four hundred years passed, the core was rotten.

It snapped at the base, while the root net was still in place.

At exactly noon she lay down,

along the road. Four cars destroyed

but no house was hit, no child crushed, no dog walker harmed.

Before she fell, there were four men with outstretched arms,

hands folded, could hardly gird the trunk, and the branches

were as wide as the trunks of younger trees.

May that circle at least remain in memory

John Richard Heide, Washington

Regarding The Post’s June 19 Metro article “Under Trump’s leadership, GOP aims to ‘reassert’ control of DC, which is at stake in election”:

At a recent celebration of the legacy of civil rights activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser responded to Donald Trump’s threat to “take over the District” by encouraging out-of-towners in the crowd to use their voices to “stand shoulder to shoulder with us in defense of our autonomy.”

With all due respect to Ms. Bowser, she has it the other way around: We, the people of D.C., will preserve self-governance by standing “shoulder to shoulder” with our fellow citizens in their states, helping them elect candidates who will protect American democracy from Mr. Trump’s threats to usurp dictatorial power. That’s how self-governance was won in 1973, as historians Chris Myers Asch, a Jackson-Reed High School graduate, and George Derek Musgrove described in their 2017 book “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.”

In 1970, the Reverend Walter Fauntroy, an associate of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., was elected to the newly created office of nonvoting delegate to Congress and assigned to the House District of Columbia Committee, whose powerful chairman, John McMillan, a segregationist from South Carolina, blocked the proposed Home Rule Charter Bill. In response, as Mr. Asch and Mr. Musgrove wrote, Fauntroy “led a vigorous campaign to unseat John McMillan” in which he helped “send dozens of organizers to McMillan’s congressional district in 1972, mobilizing black voters (who made up 28 percent of the district) and highlighting McMillan’s racist past. McMillan suffered a crushing defeat.”

McMillan’s successor as Speaker, Rep. Charles Diggs (D-Mich.), helped Congress grant D.C. a charter for home rule, which went into effect in 1974.

Thousands of Washington, D.C., and statewide citizens, including Washington Teachers Union retirees and volunteers with organizations like 31st Street Swing Left in the D.C. area, are already working to register voters and advocate on behalf of candidates for state and national office. They are working to defend hard-won freedoms by visiting voters in their homes, making phone calls, hosting letter and postcard parties, raising money, and being role models for democracy.

Maintaining self-government in Washington DC is inextricably linked to maintaining American democracy and freedoms.

In Metro’s fiscal year 2025 budget letter, WMATA General Manager and CEO Randy Clarke wrote, “Metro’s focus is, and always will be, our customers.” I’d like to take his word for it, but I’m disappointed in that promise of customer engagement after attending several “Better Bus” public hearings, town hall forums, and pop-up events this summer. I fear the city’s plans will fall far short of its stated goals of making bus transportation the preferred mode of transportation by 2030 and increasing transit use for commuting to half of trips by 2032.

In the many forums, Metro officials have failed to address important questions about equity and access to a vital public service that should be funded as such. Metro’s plan fails to recognize the essential role that Metro buses play in the lives of many of us. Our needs are simple: buses nearby, fast, frequent, and reliable.

In the four forums I visited, DC residents from every demographic said they want the bus: seniors who can’t drive, parents of schoolchildren, people with disabilities, and regular workers commuting to and from their offices. Metro customers were vocal in their concerns about the proposed changes, which would directly impact their access to schools, hospitals, jobs, and local businesses.

However, the bus lines in my neighborhood are getting smaller and smaller, making the area a real bus desert.

I live over two miles from the nearest Metrorail station. Until 2022, I was able to take the E6 bus line, which WMATA quietly canceled with limited public notice during the coronavirus pandemic. I now have to walk 45 minutes to take the Metrorail. This is simply not reasonable and sometimes not possible. Under the city’s proposed plans, other bus lines in my area—the M4, E4, and L2—will be shortened or rerouted, with what appears to be little understanding of what these changes will mean for regular bus riders who want to take the bus to get where they need to go. Chevy Chase residents already have very limited access to weekend bus service. The so-called Better Bus overhaul will reduce that even further, as the E4 will no longer offer weekend service.

Is Metro really listening to its customers? Is the proposed Better Bus plan actually better? As a decades-long regular bus rider who is committed to public transit, I say the answer to both questions is a resounding no.

Michaela Platzer, Washington

The summer closure of the Glenmont end of the Metro Red Line has been a burden on transit riders and has undoubtedly strained Metro’s already stretched budgets on contract buses. The Takoma station has reopened since late June, but Metro continues to run shuttle buses all the way to Fort Totten.

The shuttle leg from Takoma to Fort Totten is the most traffic-intensive part of the trip and takes disproportionately long, enough that the shuttle buses to Takoma and the train from there to Fort Totten are always faster. Metro should reconfigure the shuttle buses and stop paying money it barely has to run buses on a useless route. This would save on staffing costs for the Fort Totten bus stop and reduce the number of buses and drivers needed.

Instead of the current multitude of shuttle routes, two would be more efficient, save money, and reduce travel time (and potentially increase ridership and revenue). The Silver Spring bus transit center is the only shuttle stop that takes significant time off the direct route. There should be a local route that connects all the closed stations and Takoma, and an express route that covers all stations except Silver Spring. Metro can’t afford to ignore efficiencies that help passengers at the same time.

Jeremy Teichman, Silver Spring

Kudos to The Post for the excellent Metro article of July 13, “An Uneasy Peace with NATO,” which accurately captured the problems locals experienced during the security measures imposed in the city center during the NATO conference.

In describing the traffic jams, however, The Post failed to mention the significant contribution to those jams caused specifically by Metro bus drivers who made a habit of entering intersections while traffic lights were changing from yellow to red, blocking traffic on the intersecting street from proceeding on a green light. I repeatedly saw not only one bus enter the intersection in this manner on a red light, but other buses driving alongside it, forming a long wall that blocked traffic on the intersecting street from proceeding through the intersection.

You would think that the management of the Metro bus system would be wise enough to insist that their bus drivers not make matters worse by rerouting their buses to new routes around the secured area? Or were these bus drivers simply acting out of their own selfishness by prioritizing their own convenience, despite the increased “filelock” they were imposing on everyone, in addition to what the street closures would otherwise necessarily entail? At a time when everyone understandably needed to work together to make the best of the situation, the Metro bus drivers were selfishly looking out for themselves at the expense of everyone else.