To The Editor:
I thank Mr. Peter Mahoney for his My View commentary, “Why I went to Standing Rock” (The Valley Reporter, 12/15/16). I too, wanted to go but could not due to extenuating circumstances.
It was touching that veterans like Mr. Mahoney chose to stand up to the “militarized police force of corporate greed and government complicity," as he phrased it. This greed and complicity has long made a hollow pretense of our democracy on the national level. The concussion grenades, rubber bullets and water cannons it employed against unarmed demonstrators in subfreezing conditions at Standing Rock aptly displayed this. That these veterans, who signed up to protect the values that we as a nation like to purvey to the world, joined the Native Americans and the legions of other protestors (who also left comfortable existences behind them) to make this nation actually honor these principles is probably what turned the tide at Standing Rock.
Like Mr. Mahoney, I am also of the Vietnam generation. I marched against the billy clubs and tear gas of what the American historian, Bruce Catton, called “obscene contrivances of our own” in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Many Vietnam veterans joined us protestors for the same reasons that Mr. Mahoney went to Standing Rock. As the Holocaust survivor, author and Nobel Prize recipient Eli Wiesel said, “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
Thanks to the injustice of our obscene election process, if we fail to protest now we could lose all of what we value to an unstable megalomaniac and his cabal of billionaires who couldn’t care less about democracy for anyone but themselves. I will stand with Mr. Mahoney to “stick it to those who want to put profits before people.”
Walter Carpenter
Montpelier
