Don’t Lecture Sanders Supporters

In response to the letter from Honey Donegan headlined “Get on Board, Bernie Sanders,” I have one thing to say … you just don’t get it!

Bernie Sanders is the only person in this race who has stood up and fought for the middle class his entire political life. He has said from the beginning that his campaign was not about him, but was about a political revolution. The millions of people who voted for him are tired of the “Don’t think too big” mentality.

If people didn’t stand up and go out and march in the streets, children would still be working in factories, people would still be working 80-hour weeks with no overtime, women would still be second-class citizens, our schools and businesses would still be segregated, the Vietnam War would have lasted much longer, and people would still not be able to marry whoever they loved because of race or gender. We would never have gotten Social Security or Medicare and the proliferation of nuclear power would have turned our country into a giant nuclear waste dump.

Just like you don’t want to hear all the negatives that Clinton brings with her, we don’t want to hear you tell us that if we don’t vote for her it is our fault if Trump wins. No! If Trump wins it’s because the DNC and the corporate media crowned her queen before the race even started and because they did everything they could to make Bernie out as a fringe candidate not to be considered viable.

Being a woman doesn’t qualify you to be president; you still have to win over the voters. As far as I can see, she isn’t even trying to convince us that she will consider our point of view. I would love to have a woman as president, just not her. I want my grandchildren to know that when I had the opportunity to vote for a candidate that would make their world a better place, I did. Will you be able to say the same?

John Lanza

Sharon

Fun With Assault Weapons

Sometimes people are astounding. The Valley News reported (“Owners of AR-Style Rifles Defend Guns,” June 27) that Karen Butler from Huntsville, Ala., is a fan of the AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle used in the recent Orlando, Fla., nightclub massacre because, in her words, “it’s so much fun” to shoot. She lamented the anger people have against the AR because, according to her, we don’t have the same outcry over knives and baseball bats, among other things, “that are killing Americans every single day.”

I wondered why there wasn’t an outcry like this too, so I checked the FBI uniform crime reports (www.fbi.gov). It might be that there’s less concern about knives and baseball bats because of all the murders committed in America in 2011, the most recent year for which the agency posted statistics; only 13 percent involved knives or cutting instruments and only 4 percent involved blunt objects, including clubs, hammers and presumably baseball bats.

The FBI didn’t break out numbers for the AR specifically, but it did report that 68 percent of murders that year involved firearms of one sort or another. I couldn’t help noticing, as well, that Ms. Butler suspected that people feared the AR “just because they don’t have knowledge.” She might be interested in knowing these statistics.

John Campbell

Lyme

Self-Publishing Is a Good Thing

Former Vermont poet laureate, Sydney Lea, has come to the defense of Vermont’s current poet laureate, Chard deNiord. Most interesting was his description of me as a Strafford poet and “full disclosure,” he writes, “self-published.”

To be honest, I’m not sure how to take that. But evidently, the heat of Lea’s disclosure couldn’t so much as wait for the letter’s first verb. Was it a put-down? — a little ad hominem ice-breaker to warm up the conversation? As of May 7, 2016, there were 76.5 million WordPress blogs. Further, there have been 2.5 billion posts. Of those 2.5 billion posts, 2.5 billion were self-published. There are countless writers self-publishing on the internet, including a number of authors and poets among my readers. And self-publishing isn’t only a 21st century phenomenon. Mr. Lea singled out Walt Whitman for his “free verse,” but failed to observe that he was self-published. T.S. Eliot, Shelley and E.E. Cummings were also self-published. I count myself in good company.

And as for John Milton? Lea includes Paradise Lost in his list of poems that “neglect” meter and rhyme. In fact, the entirety of Paradise Lost is metrical — Iambic Pentameter through and through. Lea’s mentioning the Psalms is also ironic given that, according to Biblical scholars, many of the Psalms (if not all) were, in their original form, characterized by meter and refrain.

If Mr. Lea’s “disclosure” was meant to be dismissive, then so be it; but he dismisses more than just me. He dismisses the entirety of the online literary project. I make the deliberate choice not to seek publication through a third party. I see no reason for it. My poetry is readily accessible, is read every day and more widely, probably, because of it.

By way of comparison, where exactly does the reader go to stumble on Mr. Lea’s poems? Last I checked, “full disclosure,” neither the Dartmouth Bookstore nor the Norwich Bookstore keeps his poetry in stock. So yes, I’m self-published and happily so.

Patrick Gillespie

South Strafford