Letters to the Editor.

• Position: Letter to the Editor

Disputing Reed's Take on Ralph

Much as I respect Adolph L. Reed Jr., I found myself silently hurling invective at him till the wee hours of the morning after reading his message of doom in the October issue ("For Ralph, Without Illusions").

Did he expect all progressive to throw up our hands in despair and sigh deeply at the futility of wanting a better world, and, oh, maybe just vote for Gore, what the heck, because the Green Party looks too loose-knit at this point to be viable in the future? What about working to make a better world? What about the possibility of joining the Green Party and helping it to become more cohesive?

I've been working with the Greens since July, and in our humble corner of southeastern Connecticut, we signed up about two new volunteers per day for tabling and leafleting and generally raising awareness. We even hosted Ralph Nader himself at Connecticut College in an auditorium that was filled to overflowing (even the lobby was overflowing), mostly with young people. People do care. Enough people care that we can make a change soon, if we harness the momentum this campaign has generated. Every time I handed out leaflets, I was impressed by how many people, across the socioeconomic spectrum, were yearning for that change.

In the words of Noam Chomsky, "If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance you may contribute to making a better world. That's your choice."

I first read those words, incidentally, in the pages of The Progressive.

Penny Teal Mystic, Connecticut

Reed's "For Ralph, Without Illusions" is a bit better than Molly Ivins's confession a month earlier that she voted many times for a Texas scumbag because he was the lesser of two evils. But Reed's defense of voting for Bill Clinton in '92 was a sorry affair. Clinton's January 1992 quick trip back home to send the severely mentally retarded Ricky Ray Rector to his death was the ultimate obscenity.

Kenneth S. Sachs Hopkins, Minnesota

Anarchy's Deep Roots

Thank you for the articles by Barbara Ehrenreich ("The Post-Liberal Apocalypse") and June Jordan ("A Letter to Maria") in the October issue.

I was interested to read Ehrenreich's observations of the movement in relationship to anarchism. She characterized anarchism as a politics developed largely in reaction to the violence of the state. While there is much...