More on Levasseur
Thanks to Stephanie Kraft for the op/ed on Ray Levasseur I wish I had written ("The Right to Hear," Dec. 3, 2009). As a UMass student who attended the sedition trial talk, I didn't appreciate a police officer taking numerous photos of the audience. (When I told him that was not customary for an academic event, he asked me for my name.)
I certainly didn't appreciate state police picketing the event with signs claiming that my college "supports terrorism recruitment," and I'm still not sure how anyone can support the recruitment of "terrorism" itself.
But if the half-dozen departments that re-invited Levasseur were indeed trying to recruit terrorists from the ranks of students, they shouldn't have invited a terrorist who failed miserably at his goals and served two decades in prison. Bad example.
Yes, there are a good number of radicals at UMass. If anything, listening to Levasseur first-hand might make them think twice about committing similar acts of violence. Kraft had it right when she suggested this academic community might learn why he turned to violence.
Had Levasseur been there, a radical student might have been able to ask him, "How is it that a former soldier came to use violence against the same government that once employed him to commit violence in Vietnam?"
Instead, students at the talk encountered an overwhelming police presence that tried to quell free speech. Indeed, the police and Governor Patrick may have inadvertently given those young radicals an impression that is the same as the conclusion Levasseur came to—that government still has its repressive moments.
Steven Hoeschele
Northampton
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Stephanie Kraft's piece "The Right to Hear" makes a valid point about citizens having the right to hear ideas that some may deem harmful. However, she contradicts herself with the false abstraction that violence is some kind of monolithic evil.
Would she have shunned the violence that our forebears used against British rulers?
Would she have denied [its use to] African Americans who, along with their European American counterparts, used violence to be able to rid North America of human enslavement?
There are all kinds of violence. For example, there is economic violence used in so many ways in this society—and around the world.
Besides, there is so much violence that has little to do with hitting. As one of my siblings wrote to me recently, "I believe it is nothing short of violence when a certain child is deemed a failure when it is the system that is failing the child. It is nothing short of violence when resources that could be used to help families are diverted to feed the pockets of greedy, already absurdly wealthy individuals or corporations or when people can't get nutritious food."
Finally, pacifists and others who claim to be nonviolent are only able to be nonviolent because they can rely upon the violence of the police and military to protect them.
G. Djata Bumpus
Northampton
Step It Up to Shut Nuke Down
Many of us who live here in the Connecticut Valley, downwind and downstream from the Entergy Corporation's Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor in Vernon, Vt., are tired of living with the reactor's "low-level" radioactive emissions that we know can cause cancer, birth defects and other problems; tired of wondering whether the ongoing problems at this aged reactor will someday result in a major accident with catastrophic consequences for this entire area; tired of putting up with make-believe evacuation plans that have never been subjected to a live test; tired of worrying about the reactor's "high-level" nuclear waste that has begun to be stored on the banks of the Connecticut River; and tired of having no official voice when it comes to the future of this reactor, just because we live a few miles south of the Vermont-Massachusetts border.
Yet we know that we cannot be silent about our concerns. We have to speak up, if only to encourage our neighbors throughout the state of Vermont to speak up. And this is a critical time to do it, since the Vermont Legislature will soon decide whether to let Entergy operate Vermont Yankee for another 20 years, or retire it on schedule when its original 40-year license expires in March of 2012, using this opportunity to speed up the necessary transition to safe, renewable energy sources.
One way that some of us who live in towns near the reactor (in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont) are planning to speak up is by participating in a 125-mile walk—entitled Step It Up to Shut It Down—from Brattleboro to Montpelier, Vermont's state capital.
The walk, which is sponsored by the Safe and Green Campaign and the Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance, will leave Brattleboro on January 2nd and arrive in Montpelier on January 13th, when we will talk with Vermont legislators in person and tell them why we insist that Vermont Yankee be retired.
If you share these sentiments, please consider joining the walk—for a few hours, a day, a week, or for the whole 12 days. Transportation, food and lodging will be provided. You can also make a financial contribution that will support others who are walking.
A preparatory meeting for people planning to walk for any amount of time will be held on Monday, Dec. 14th at 7 p.m. at the Marlboro Tech Center, 28 Vernon Street in Brattleboro. For further information, please call Randy Kehler at (413) 624-8858 or Bob Bady at (802) 258-7750.
Randy Kehler
Colrain
If a Tree Falls…
Mr. Mason is way off base in his Dec. 3 letter claiming that biomass plants won't lead to clearcutting. The state has already started aggressively clearcutting state forests and parks and is targeting state forests and parks for a 1,082 percent increase in logging to fuel the biomass plants (see www.maforests.org).
If they are already clearcutting today, before the biomass plants even exist, and the proposed plants would require nearly a quadrupling of logging on public and private forests to fuel the plants, of course there will be clearcutting and heavy logging.
The simple fact is that the biomass plants will pay the least they can for the wood, and the lowest-cost wood will come from clearcuts and heavy logging jobs.
While much of the forestry in Massachusetts has historically been "hi-grading," where they take the best and leave the rest, the new logging will take the best for timber and clearcut the rest for biomass.
At a time of polluted air, a carbon dioxide-overloaded atmosphere, stressed forests and empty public budgets, forcing taxpayers to subsidize cutting and burning of forests is just about the dumbest thing imaginable we can do.
Unfortunately, that is what the leaders in Boston are serving up unless Western Mass. folks speak up.
Chris Matera
via email
