Tone it down

Sometime during the 1960s or 1970s there was a shooting at an abortion clinic in Boston. The leadership of both pro-choice and pro-life factions were so shaken by this event that they agreed to meet to try to tone down the rhetoric. They met together for two years, at the end of which time they observed a significant cooling down of the tensions around the abortion debate.

An important part of their process was for participants to tell each other what made them most angry. For example, the pro-choice people said they hated being called murderers, and the pro-life people said they hated being called shills for the patriarchy. They agreed to refrain from speaking to—even thinking of—each other in these ways.

We could certainly benefit from such a process today. The political class would have us believe that our opponents are demons and that a win by the opposite party would be an existential threat to democracy. I don’t buy it. We have already survived a Trump presidency and the better part of a Biden presidency. The biggest threat to our democracy just might be that ordinary people give up on it and on each other.

-Carol Frenier, Chelsea

To the Editor:

Mr. Biden can no longer read a teleprompter. But, he will no doubt still be doing the “goodest job” he can to defeat the “linjured” “former Trump” at the the “battle boxes” in November.

Biden’s address to the nation after the assassination attempt on Trump was utterly sad. (I took from it the last of the 3 ‘words’/phrases in quotation marks above.) It reminded me of the Dementia Party trotting out Robert Mueller before Congress and Mueller looking mostly like a deer caught in headlights, looking and acting like he had almost no clue about the report on ‘Russia-Gate’ that had his name on it.

Tucker Carlson has reported that Biden’s sister Val told his neighbor that Joe had dementia back in 2019 and that the family was upset that he wanted to run for President. According to Carlson, the family figured they’d allow him to do so, so that he could get it out of his system. Never imagining that he would win!

So, who has been running the country? My bet continues to be on Jewish Neocon war-lover Victoria Nuland, who started the whole thing in Ukraine back in 2014 by overthrowing a democratically-elected government and sparking a civil war. 

In any case, after the last couple of weeks, how can anyone—like Bernie Sanders—still insist that Biden is a viable candidate? And are most Democrats perhaps going to go to the polls figuring that they’re voting for Kamala Harris—a woman who hasn’t said one intelligent thing in the last 4 years?

-Jacqueline Brook, Putney

In reference to the following article:

https://vermontjournal.com/school-news/cavendish-demands-a-voice-on-gmusd-restructuring-plans/.

Act 60/68, Act 46 and the education bureaucracy in Montpelier, all pushed hard by progressive Democrats, have created a death spiral for small rural schools. The teachers and their local leftist minions are gnashing their teeth about impending school closures but will again go out on Election Day and vote for the same people that are going to shut them down. The history of what has happened to the public school system since before and after the passage of Act 60 in 1997 is thoroughly documented yet the Vermont voter has a memory no longer than the latest soundbite on VPR and WCAX. So sad that my fellow citizens cannot connect even two dots together.

–S. Lindberg