Letters (May 4, 2023)

• Historical Society Needs Board Members
• The Necessary ‘The’
• Appalled
• Going, Going...
• The Uglier Underside Of The Vietnam War
• Valuing Guns Over Life
• Have You Noticed…
• A Knock On An Irish Door
• Stardust Knowing

HISTORICAL SOCIETY NEEDS BOARD MEMBERS

To the Editor:

The Historical Society of Mendocino County is seeking applicants for its Board of Directors. At present we have three openings.

The Society’s mission is the preservation of the history of Mendocino County at its modern Toney Archival Building at 100 South Dora Street in Ukiah.

It also is tasked with ensuring that documents are available for research and study to present and future generations.

In addition, the Board oversees the Held-Poage Memorial Home as it is in the process of being restored to its 1920’s glory.

Interested? Contact us at: (707) 462-6969. Or info@mendocinocountyhistory.org  Or visit our website www.mendocinocountyhistory.org.

Sincerely yours,

Marvin Talso, Board President

Ukiah

THE NECESSARY ‘THE’

Editor,

Got a prolonged chuckle out of the "Bidenistas Gather" headline.

On the other hand, I continue to shake my head at the insistent references to "the" Anderson Valley. In your Ed Notes there was no "the" attached to multiple references about Napa Valley. 

My mother was able to attend a year of high school in Anderson Valley during the 1930s and without ever referring to the entire locale as "the" Anderson Valley. Going farther back, my oldest uncle (born in 1888) constructed a home for himself and his wife in the town of Navarro and who owned property near Floodgate, did not add "the" in front of references to Anderson Valley.

This use of "the" as an introductory article to Anderson Valley reeks of an insecurity second only to the pretentious affectation of referring to a certain coastal community as 'the village."

Beyond that, it is good to see you continuing to edit and publish the AVA.

Malcolm Macdonald

Mendocino

ED NOTE: The Anderson Valley, being the one and only, and certainly the one and only valley in the eyes of the people who live here, the singular The Anderson Valley is not only appropriate but required.

APPALLED

Hello Mendo Coast!!

I am appalled by the actions of my fellow board members!! Keeping healthcare on the coast is more important than anyone’s personal agenda. The current Treasurer make our previous one look like an angel! He has repeatedly put forward non compliant reports with his “made up” information. He does not have the skill set to do this role. He refuses to work with me because he says I belittle him. Sorry but telling you that you don’t report the numbers on a cash basis or the liabilities that don’t show on an income statement is stating fact! The current chair continually lets him interrupt me! He has NEVER asked me one question about anything from the last group! He has LIED to the public! He won’t listen to real professional advice. The lawyer they are using is a joke!! I have stayed quiet through a ton of shit over the last few years but it’s time to speak up! This new board does not care what the truth is or the parameters we need to use with public funds. Jade [Tippett] has literally threatened to call the cops to remove a member of the public because he didn’t like what was being said, apparently he has forgotten the First Amendment.

We can not let this continue, we need to figure out how to meet the needs of the entire coast without overspending. Please come to meetings, watch the past Zooms. Let me know if you want more information.

Sara Reynolds Spring (sspring@mcdh.org)

Mendocino

GOING, GOING...

Editor: 

My wife and I recently returned home from a day in San Francisco in which we had attended the production of the Broadway play “Come From Away.” We parked near City Hall and walked down Golden Gate Avenue to the theater district near Market Street. The walk to and from our car was in painful contrast with the matinee.

“Come From Away” tells a true story of openness, hospitality and generosity between strangers which leaves the theatergoer with an optimistic sense of what human nature can be and how we are capable of treating one another.

In contrast, the walk up and down Golden Gate Avenue requires pedestrians to step over or around bodies slumped in a doorway or passed out across the sidewalk. Too many to count.

Alcohol, fentanyl or heroin, I do not know. But I do know, or at least firmly believe, that by continuing to ignore the poor, the homeless, the addicted, all of those less fortunate than ourselves, we will in time lose our own sense of humanity. We will become the victims of our own indifference.

Jim Pedgrift

Santa Rosa

THE UGLIER UNDERSIDE OF THE VIETNAM WAR

Letter to the Editor

I thought Jonah Raskin’s Vietnam article (AVA, 4/26/23) was very informative.

I’m a veteran (US Army 1968-1970) who refused to pick up a weapon when I was drafted. As far as I was concerned, the US had illegally invaded Vietnam.

Something hardly anyone knows is that the CIA was and probably still is one of the largest drug dealers in the world. I’m a member of Veterans For Peace (VFP). I heard from members of VFP that they guarded an amount of heroin so huge that it would have filled a football field. The CIA imported that into the US, fueling the heroin problems in the US in the decades after Vietnam.

Lindsay Moran, a one-time clandestine CIA officer, said, “The agency was elbow deep with drug traffickers.”

New York University professor Christian Parenti said, “The CIA is from its very beginning collaborating with mafiosas who are involved in the drug trade because these mafiosas will serve the larger agenda of fighting communism.”

“In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.” — Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit. All these quotes are from the Institute for Policy Studies.

Then we have the problem of how horrid the Vietnam war experience was for military personnel who came back alive and couldn’t handle what they had seen and experienced there.

CBS’s 60 Minutes, Vietnam 101, 4 October, 1986, broadcast that more than 100,000 Vietnam veterans had committed suicide. In 1988, a network news anchor (CBS Reports: The Wall Within, 2 Jun, 1988) asserted that between 26,000 and 100,000 suicides had occurred among Vietnam veterans.

A member of my bicycle group was stationed on a Navy ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. This was where the so-called incident used by the US government to justify the invasion of sovereign Vietnam supposedly occurred. He said the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened.

Other Veterans For Peace members told me they weren’t allowed to fire upon a known informer who guided the Vietcong where to aim their ordinance at US soldiers and installations. This was because he traveled through land owned by the Goodrich tire corporation.

US invasions to further economic interests and drug interests cannot be tolerated by We The People any longer.

Ed Oberweiser

Fort Bragg

VALUING GUNS OVER LIFE

Editor: 

The State Department issues warnings about unsafe conditions in various parts of the world, when here in gun-loving America, people are shot for mistakenly going down the wrong driveway or knocking on the wrong door. Heck, we get shot while grocery shopping, going to a concert, at school, worshipping, driving and everywhere in between.

My advice to friends around the world is, don’t come to the U.S. The situation is so bad that even Americans worry about going out in public. I never ever worried about such occurrences in the past, but I do now. Was that a car backfiring, or the start of a road-rage shootout? Was that loud rat-a-tat-tat a machine at work or an AR-15 rifle being sprayed at innocent shoppers?

Mental health, economic disparity and alienation are issues worldwide, but only here do these societal problems explode in a flurry of bullets. America is no longer the land of the free. We have become the land of the terrified, huddled in our homes to stay safe, ready to shoot anyone who may knock on our doors, or mistakenly go down our driveway. In a word, we have become a society that values guns over life.

Vic Auto

Cloverdale

HAVE YOU NOTICED…

Editor: 

Have you noticed that discussion of documents about U.S. activities in Ukraine is about the person who released them, not what was revealed? That’s because those who want clueless citizens don’t think you have the right to be informed. They hope you’ll focus on the “traitor” instead of their dangerous decisions. It’s also why most of the history of U.S. involvement in the region has been effectively banned.

This is how the war on Vietnam started — U.S. advisers on the ground when it was being billed as another country’s war. Americans didn’t even know it had started (the U.S. began funding the bulk of France’s war in the 1950s).

They want you to think they are the best and the brightest when, in fact, their track record is abysmal. If it hadn’t been for whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and a vigilant antiwar movement, we might not be alive today. Your government was considering the use of nuclear weapons and still considers them a viable option.

All this risk because U.S. corporations want access to markets, resources and economic control of the world, whether other countries want it or not. And on his death bed, Ellsberg is warning us again.

Susan Collier Lamont

Santa Rosa

A KNOCK ON AN IRISH DOOR

To the Editor:

Last spring, I was traveling with my Irish friend in rural Ireland. We were on a road trip and could not find a waterfall we were looking for. My friend saw a house in the distance and said, “Hold on, I’m going to stop and ask for directions.”

I was concerned and surprised that she didn’t hesitate to walk up a long driveway, ring the doorbell and ask a stranger for directions. 

Ten minutes later my friend was still talking to the man who answered the door. As we drove off, he waved to us.

I explained my response to my friend, and she looked at me and said, “Denise, we don’t have guns here.”

Denise Garone

San Francisco

STARDUST KNOWING

Editor,

We are all made of stardust. All of the earth is stardust, and we are all stardust together — animals, oceans, fungi, trees, and bees.

But we humans are living in a vortex of fear and grievance. We seem caught in an obsessive need to dominate — Nature by capitalists, workers by bosses, women by men, one religion over another or over non-believers. Domination implies exploitation and deprivation of who or what is dominated. The guys on top are poisoned by hubris.

The paradox is that Nature repairs herself. Extraction pollution and environmental destruction have wounded our planet home and brought on the Climate Crisis. If we would only step back from our frantic effort to master Nature and realize that we are not apart from the web of life, but entangled in its benevolence, at one with its seasons.

We earthlings seem to be at a tipping point, facing judgment for our selfish greed. The gods are angry with us, sending us furious winds, elemental drought, then wide flooding, huge wildfires, and fierce earthquakes, with worldwide pestilence. We are stressed by war and the killing of children in their classrooms. Pernicious plots and paranoias mislead us and divide us into angry tribes of smug sureness. The world seems to be falling apart.

Can we regain a hopeful reality? Can we regain some gratitude for our place on this lovely blue planet? Can we stop battling Nature to allow her to cure her hurts and devastations? It will take some major re-structuring of social institutions and attitudes. We must replace Martin Luther with Martin Luther King, and nail our 95 Theses to the door of the Stock Exchange, post them on Twitter. We must send modern day Amazons out to take back their good name and fierce integrity from the behemoth capitalist corporations. We must ban Bayer’s neonicotinoids so that bees can fly free to pollinate our foods. We must learn again to help each other. And we can learn much from the Indigenous peoples of the world, for they have kept the ancient wisdom alive and know the ancient lifeways of dwelling in Nature’s embrace.

Recently I heard a song: “Hope comes from the place where the hurt comes.” Let us rise up from the chaos, pain, and confusion of the present moment and seize hope from the bursting forth of Springtime around us, claim our innate kinship with all that is, being made of the stuff of the universe, star beings.

Ann Morley

Napa