The University of Vermont's Independent Voice Since 1883

The Vermont Cynic

The University of Vermont's Independent Voice Since 1883

The Vermont Cynic

The University of Vermont's Independent Voice Since 1883

The Vermont Cynic

Column on Leftists Not Right

To the Editor:

In his recent article, Russell Henderson sought to criticize the movement against the war on Iraq, and especially the manifestation this movement took recently with the protest at City Hall.

However, in doing so, he managed to attack many of the issues that that the ‘right’ in this country associate with the ‘leftists.’

His criticized the protest, saying that it was not about pacifism but about anti-Bushism.

But, sad to say, those two bents unite under the current administration.

I am a patriotic American, and I care about this country and the potential we have to improve the world.

Therefore, I find it of the utmost importance to voice my dissent when I see our country’s government in the hands of an administration I believe to be a. controlled by corporations when it comes to economic issues and b. that answers to the Christian right when it comes to social issues.

And since neither corporate America nor the Christian right embody the values of an egalitarian society and of individual freedom that America is all about, I find the current administration, not the so-called ‘leftists’ that the column refers to, to be the true anti-Americans.

The column sites the example of an anti-IMF protest in New York in which union

workers at a construction site threw rocks at the protesters, and uses this one example as a reason to broadly suggest that ‘these crusaders for the working class are shunned by the people whose cause they claim to advance.’

First of all, the opinions of one group of construction workers do not embody the views of all working-class Americans, and furthermore, one of the main concerns of the anti-IMF/World Bank/ITO movement is the treatment of workers by these corporations in other countries.

Countries where poor workers work 20 hour shifts in sweat shops and take home 40 cents a day because corporations can cut costs by employing workers there rather than workers here.

Other points made in the article are not even worth addressing, such as the criticism of the feminist movement.

Henderson scoffs at it because some people who crusade for a woman’s right to choose and against domestic violence are somehow hypocritical in their stances. Why?

Because, he says, they choose not to label themselves as feminists. What?

The column concludes by saying that “the far left is helping to stifle the very dissent it seeks to encourage.”

Perhaps many issues that the ‘far left’ tend to bring up are equally uncomfortable for Democratic and Republican politicians alike.

However, the dissent of the moderates in Washington against the far-right hardly goes far enough in addressing the issues this country desperately needs to confront with regard to, as Henderson’s column so aptly dubbed it, the Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft Axis of Evil.

Shap Sweeney
Class of 2003

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