08A | august 20-27, 2008 | » sevendaysvt.com
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Seven Days wants your rants and raves, in 250 words or fewer. Letters must respond to content in Seven Days. Include your full name, town and a daytime phone number, and post to: sevendaysvt.com/letters or letters@sevendaysvt.com or mail to: Seven Days, P.O. Box 1164, Burlington, VT 05402-1164.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE Though Ken Picard’s recent article about Pine Ridge School [“Hard Lessons,” July 16] was primarily an attack on Headmaster Dana Blackhurst, in which the lone named critic lacked credibility and the others were anonymous, Picard did not bother to speak to current parents, current members of the Board of Trustees, heads of other schools or even ex-staff members who would support Dana and could provide a bigger context to this story. Picard was given those names and numbers. Dana was the focus of the story, yet Picard did not interview him until Thursday, July 10, and the story printed Wednesday, July 16. Wouldn’t a balanced report require adequate time for follow-up research after interviewing the main subject? Picard did not report on our new VT scholarship but instead described it as “slashing” tuition. Dana’s office is full of textbooks. The photographer took pictures of them, but Picard chose to only mention toy cars and a box of Fruit Loops (gifts from former students). Our students are taught that they are not defined by their diswww.flynncenter.org ability/learning differences. Your cover, of which I could find no other comparable example in the last decade of Seven Days, literally framed Dana by his dyslexia. How did the editors miss that this was
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appallingly insensitive and simply ignorant? Picard’s report described preDana PRS as a “tight-knit community” that was over-staffed, suffering from mission drift and racking up $1.4 million in debt — yet Dana was portrayed as the problem? Cognitive dissonance, anyone? John Thomas SOUTH BURLINGTON
Thomas is the admissions director at Pine Ridge School.
goals of personal and collective sovereignty and dignity. It is also revealing about the moral foundation of the SVR (which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Thomas Naylor) that a lifelong activist for progressive social change and small-scale economics such as myself was “dismissed” from both my active membership in the SVR and my role on the editorial board of the Vermont Commons because I publicly questioned the undemocratic nature of the
leadership (at that time, Thomas Naylor and Rob Williams). Like McKibben, I believe that true independence comes from the feet-on-the-ground activism of pragmatists rather than from the self-important declarations and theatrics of autocratic “movements” of questionable provenance. Robert Riversong WARREN
BEER KART I recently read something in the Seven Daysies issue [August 6] that seriously disturbed me. Staff writer Jon Taylor reports on The Kountry Kart Deli, the staff pick for “Best Pub Crawl Finish Line.” Taylor starts by not talking about the deli itself, but by describing the booze-soaked events which lead revelers to the Kountry Kart: “… in a bar-laden town such as Burlington, it’s damn near impossible MORE LETTERS >> 13A
PRAGMATIC SECESSION I appreciate Bill McKibben’s praise for the down-to-earth activists and practitioners of a self-sufficient Vermont, as well as his concern that the Vermont secession movement (if it can even be called a movement) is more intellectual than pragmatic [“Independence Fray,” July 23]. It was also telling that McKibben referred to Thomas Naylor, a southerner relocated to Vermont, as the “leader” of the Vermont independence effort when he described the controversy over the Second Vermont Republic’s association with the League of the South. In his ostensible role as “leader” of www.flynncenter.org this nascent movement, Naylor has distanced himself from the neo-racist League without ever offering an apology for giving priority to the tactic of secession over the moral
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