The River Reporter Online - Letters to the Editor

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The River Reporter welcomes letters on all subjects from its readers. They must be signed and include the correspondent's phone number. The correspondent's name and town will appear at the bottom of each letter; titles and affiliations will not, unless the correspondent is writing on behalf of a group.

Letters are printed as they are received, or at the discretion of the editor, and without correction to grammar or spelling. It is requested they be limited to 500 words; correspondents may be asked to cut longer letters. Deadline is 1:00 p.m. on Monday.

The officers and members of the Lumberland Fire Department would like to thank you for donating the two six-month subscriptions for use as raffle prizes for this year’s turkey shoot. Your support was very much appreciated and helped to make the day a big success.

This year’s shoot raised just over $2,000 for the department to use in its service to the community.

As a long-time subscriber to The River Reporter I congratulate you for the fine newspaper. The River Reporter is very valuable and excellent in the presentation of the local and regional news, in its style and overall communication skills in the newsprint format. Your paper is a reflection of the fine work the editorial staff is producing over the years.

To accomplish that, your editors have a good idea of what the newspaper readers want, carefully imposing their style by taking the needs and desires of their clients into account. They create a trust between the readers and editors and, by doing so, they not only print a newspaper, they are expanding their services also. At the same time they lead a healthy competition head-to-head with other newspapers. This process makes the paper more attractive, more prosperous and assures better success and growth.

So, my best wishes to you. Keep up this commendable quality in your work. I’m sure that many more readers of The River Reporter share my view.

Once again the holiday season is upon us and we are all thinking about what to give that special or hard-to-buy-for person on our lists. Well, here’s a suggestion for your readers: make a donation to the Dessin Animal Shelter or any other charity, in that person’s name.

As many of you know, most charitable organizations are having financial difficulties these days. Giving a donation not only benefits the charity, it is also a unique gift.

On this Thanksgiving weekend, I find myself very grateful for friends and family. I am grateful that the United Nations has weapons inspectors hard at work in Iraq. So far, they have found nothing.

In my opinion, our current administration has made cynical use of the tragedy of September 11 and the emotions it generated to engage this country in a wasteful, unnecessary, and immoral war against Iraq. I have felt the need to do something—to say in some meaningful way that this action is “not in my name.”

I can write this letter. I can send copies to my legislators. I can continue to be part of WaynePeace and keep up with the activities of SullivanPeace.

I can invite you to come to the Grace Episcopal Church meeting room Saturday, December 7, 2002, at 1:00 p.m. and see a film called “Just September” sponsored by Wayne Peace. It offers another point of view of the world and our place in it. I can go to Washington, DC, on January 18 and 19 to bear witness, to say in a tangible way, “not in my name.”

To find out more about WaynePeace, call 570/251-3637. For SullivanPeace, call 845/482-3527.

Hey, you liberals out there. According to Mr. Fuller, you liberals may be the only people, presumably in the world, that haven’t accepted that “Republicans have taken over the world”!

I wonder how many of us who are independent thinkers feel the same way? I wonder how many Americans who are Republicans feel that way?

We are all Americans but Mr. Fuller has taken the “us or them” approach that alienates so many.

Mr. Fuller wants everyone to get into lockstep with the notion that Mr. Bush will “monger” peace by going to war with at least four in the Axis of Evil. Under Fuller’s “us or them” scenario we may be attacking Switzerland for being neutral.

I consider myself somewhat fiscally conservative and somewhat socially liberal. I know we must fight and win the war on terrorism (i.e., the cowardly murderers who took down the Towers, Al-Qaeda, Hezbolah). I still have my doubts about the War in Iraq. I served in the Army during the Vietnam conflict without question but then came to disagree with my government on the justification for the enormous loss of young American lives. So am I a peacenik, a lefty, holding hands with Saddam and Hitler?

What it comes down to for people who currently serve or who have served their country, as well as for all Americans, is to understand that, like it or not, we are serving to defend the right of Americans to dissent, to burn an American Flag, to protest, and likewise we defend the right of Mr. Fuller to call those who disagree anti-American and worse.

That’s right, I served so that Mr. Fuller could disparage fellow Americans because they disagree with their elected officials about preferring peace to war. Here’s the difference between us. I believe that Mr. Fuller, as misguided as he is, has every right to be a warmonger and I’ll defend his right to be one. He, on the other hand, would make it an act of treason to protest our government’s actions. And here’s a minor correction. President Clinton was a war protester, not, as you would like to call him a draft dodger, a criminal offense. (We only have one president with an arrest record: G.W. Bush.) Clinton and millions of Americans of all political beliefs thought that the loss of 50,000+ American lives was unconscionable and opposed the war. What is there that you seem to know that makes you know that war and the potential loss of thousands of lives is necessary? Convince me with facts and I’m with you. I hope your sole justification is not “Republicans have taken over the world.”

In saying “Or would you like there to be more people like Saddam in the world,” Mr. Fuller falls into the false dichotomy fallacy so beloved by conservatives—you’re either with us or against us, as George Bush put it. Most of us in the peace movement have no problem condemning bullies of any stripe, whether it’s Hussein or Bush, Sharon or Arafat. And as to whether “young adults... can make their own decisions,” I wonder if Mr. Fuller is familiar with the Selective Service Act, or with the recently passed provision requiring school districts to release names, addresses, and phone numbers of all their students to military recruiters, or with other proposed legislation to make military training required even for conscientious objectors. The time when military service is seen as optional may well be drawing to a close—except, of course, for the well-connected, which was the point of the original comment.

But the most interesting part of Mr. Fuller’s letter is his declaration that “Republicans have taken over the world.” One wonders if he cackled maniacally after typing that sentence, delusional and power-mad as it is—yet it is also instructive as to what Mr. Fuller (and very likely the Administration) seems to see as the point: world domination. I hate to have to point out to him that there are still billions of people in this country and around the world, myself included, whose minds, at least, have not yet succumbed to the Republican ideological onslaught, and I can tell him with sincerity that I for one will die before leaving those ranks. He needs to get used to that.

There’s nothing new about an elected official forgetting who he or she works for. Nor is it unusual for a politician to start saying silly things when constituents take him to task for doing something wrong. So, Bethel Councilman, Lyndon Lilley, can easily be forgiven for what was, hopefully, a temporary lapse in forgetting about America’s 1776 social contract between the elected and the electorate. Unfortunately, however, the councilman went even further out of bounds at the close of the November 21 Bethel board meeting by stating that the Smallwood Civic Association was “getting in the way of town business.” (The River Reporter, Nov. 28) Whoa.

As TRR reporter, Chris Conroy, who has covered this story for months, pointed out, “the civic association has been a constant, vocal and critical presence at town board meetings since it took issue with the town’s decision to allow Woodstone Development to erect a gate at the intersection of Split Rock Road and Pine Grove Road.”

�Constant, vocal and critical�? Absolutely. But getting in the way of town business? Mr. Lilley�s allegation against Smallwood, a 1,000-home hamlet and by far the town�s largest residential complex, is as untrue as it is absurd.

What the councilman deems as getting in the way of town business is the association’s refusal to allow the town board to turn over the peoples’ business—gating a town road —to private developer Steve Dubrovsky, aka Woodstone Lakes Development.

Mr. Lilley, by virtue of his October 10 vote to vacate a May 30 resolution, conceded that the Dubrovsky gate denying public access to the boat launch and beach of Toronto Reservoir was illegal and should be removed. To everyone’s surprise, however, Mr. Lilley and company decided on October 24 that despite their specific wording, to vacate, their intent was only to open the gate and not compel Dubrovsky to take it down even though everyone admits it’s illegal in the first place.

The truth of the matter is that Mr. Lilley, heretofore a hard-working and competent official, was led astray by his own town supervisor who acceded to developer Dubrovsky’s campaign to keep Bethel’s blue-collar crowd off Toronto’s beaches in his quest to build Chapin Estates—a planned 6,000-acre gated compound of multi-million dollar shoreline homes on� five-acre parcels. Once a July 35 local news story exposed the tweaking of the Bethel board to close the road with a phony post-9/11 terrorist alert, Councilman Lilley and each of his three colleagues had the opportunity to make things right by disassociating themselves from the scheme and ordering the gate removed. Rather than rushing to their constituents’ defense, however, they opted to let the public be damned and chose to stick with the developer. Mr. Lilley, having made his bed with Dubrovsky, can’t now turn around and blame the citizenry for making him sleep in it.

Has anyone, especially among those who do not bother to vote, noticed the significant attitude change concerning protecting areas that shelter the best of America’s natural resources since the last presidential election? It appears that the last minute efforts by the Clinton administration to deal with environmental damage from public pressure and corporate greed, are being stalled, modified, or reversed in the name of private industry and political favors for select groups. National forests are being opened up to more cutting because someone felt that it would create a better fire break for people who choose to live in or near national forests. Building your summer home in a national forest (allowed on a lease basis in some areas) or next to a forest for the esthetics should have no bearing on forest management practices. Plans to set aside land for public protection no longer move forward to fruition. Recycling is no longer the watchword for reducing landfill problems in large cities. “Unprofitable” is the common cry, but how many cities factor in the long term damage to places where their trash is dumped.

The policy reversal that scares me most is negating the Clinton proposal to stop private snowmobile use in Yellowstone National Park. Up to fifteen hundred smoke belching machines have been recorded daily entering the park in winter. (Enough to require that fresh air be pumped into the entrance station for the rangers’ well being) Instead of the peace and serenity of the Yellowstone backcountry, you have what sounds like herd of chain saws roaring through a place that was established to preserve this quiet unpolluted piece of America as it existed before man invented snowmobiles. The current administration wants to solve the problem by only allowing the new and quieter machines to enter the park and to use park rangers as guides. Do those who propose this solution really believe that that a herd of buffalo that are trying to maintain their strength in bitter winter cold by standing still for hours, will not stampede and waste precious body heat because of passing snowmobiles? Do they believe that Yellowstone’s minimal winter staff of ranger personnel will be able to control hundreds of snowmobile lovers who relish the thrill of traveling sixty plus miles per hour over snow? The only acceptable mode of public transportation at Yellowstone in winter has been by foot, horse-drawn sled or snow tractors that are very minimally impacting on the environment. If large numbers of people want to enjoy the park area in winter, it should be through some form of quiet public conveyance only.