Dan DeWalt
No more money for Israel
Dan DeWalt, one of the founders of this newspaper and a longtime activist for social justice, clean energy, peace, and restorative justice, describes this piece as "a collaboration with another Windham County citizen whose job status would be at risk were they to disclose their name."...
On false promises and outright deceit
If our politicians are so cowed by powerful interest groups like the pro-Israel lobby or corporate sponsors or weapons makers or a wannabe autocrat that they willingly lie, then we have lost our Republic
What makes politicians publicly embrace a lie when the truth is staring them in the face? "There is an apartheid state here. In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state." A simple statement of fact - in this case made...
Family values are not expressed by what type of genitals you were born with
The radical right has attacked the trans community, in order to save the now-not-so-dominant paradigm of white male supremacy in the ordering and ruling of this nation
America's radical right has chosen to target drag shows and transgender people in their latest assault on family values posing as a defense of family values. Shocked cries about grooming and child abuse are spewing from their mouths like pea soup from Regan in The Exorcist. The very folks...
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We don’t deserve a guarantee of comfort every time we experience art or music
On Jan. 26, Brattleboro was treated to an evening of Windham County’s Got Talent. Young contestants got a chance to perform for the judges and the public. One young student, after an investment of time and hard work, was excited to perform Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” However, less than hour before the performance, a parent voiced an objection to the song and asked that it not be performed. To their credit, the organizers encouraged the youth to go forward with...
Whose story?
History - what could be simpler? Things happen, they get written down, we read about it. For instance, the Boston Tea Party was an act of piracy, the revolution was a criminal enterprise. Not so fast, you say? This take might have been the historical view of the British, but it misconstrues the noble acts of self-determination and free speech that is the real story of that conflict. Or consider the Spanish-American War, which gave the Cubans a new American...
Sorting through the candidates for Congress
The candidates in the race for the U.S. House seat represent an surprising array of choices for Vermonters to sort through. If you think that the U.S. Congress is doing a fine job and should just keep on doing what it always has, then Molly Gray, who is somehow perceived as an interloping carpetbagger while simultaneously being a native daughter of Vermont, is the choice for you. She is the darling of the Democratic establishment and will be a loyal...
Welch is ‘selling access and connections, pure and simple’
U.S. Rep. Peter Welch tries to talk a good game about serving the people. But his performative puffery, like bragging about not taking PAC contributions while still raking it in from trade associations that are nothing but PACs with another name, shows that he is as at the heart of the problem that the U.S. Congress has become. Welch is very popular in Vermont. His Republican opponent faces an extreme uphill battle to get traction in the race, and any...
Americans have no right to be on our high horse while we oppose the war in Ukraine
A large country, armed to the teeth, entering into the dusk as a superpower, makes outlandish claims about another, much smaller and weaker country. The rest of the world's nations scratch their heads and wonder at these claims. The large country amasses troops and armaments near the smaller country. It gives the smaller country an ultimatum that cannot be met because it is based on a false premise. Very few other nations are interested in joining the bellicosity of the...