Letters: Border wall would affect wildlife; What’s the point of a center to study Greek life?
Wildlife and the wall
In a recent letter to the editor, Toby Carlson from State College listed four reasons against “Trump’s Wall.” I would like to add a fifth reason, but first I will reiterate Mr. Carlson’s stated reasons: 1) Ineffective due to using 12th century technology today, instead of “more sophisticated electronic surveillance,” 2) Any deal with Trump regarding the wall would be rescinded, void and nullified because he’s such a liar and thus untrustworthy, 3) If the government shutdown gives him what he wants he will do it again and again to get what he wants and 4) the wall, “if ever constructed, would stand before the world as a monumental insult to Mexico and to people of color.”
A fifth and rarely mentioned reason is the wall would bisect critical migration pathways for endangered species: jaguars, ocelots, wolves and other borderlands wildlife. A wall would block the Rio Grande River, the only reliable water source for so many animals. I urge you to watch (Google) a video by Ben Masters, “Wildlife and the Wall,” showing some of the ecological and wildlife impacts of a border wall. We must not let this happen!
What does today’s Republican Party offer us?
Watching Donald Trump’s Republican Party today, it is worth remembering that it was once known as the party of Lincoln, the party that ended slavery and enacted the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.
And the Democratic Party was the party of Jefferson Davis. After the Civil War it worked in the South to sabotage those amendments through terrorism, Jim Crow and lynch law.
The Democratic Party started to change during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, absorbing Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive Republicans such as Altoona’s Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. But it was not until the 1960s that courageous blacks like Martin Luther King and politicians such as Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson bent the party to its present posture on civil rights.
I was reminded of all this when reading “Making and Remaking Pennsylvania’s Civil War,” edited by Penn State historians William Blair and William Pencak, and its essay by Henry Pisciotta about the 30-foot high Charles Avery memorial monument dedicated in 1859 in a Pittsburgh cemetery. It honors the wealthy white industrialist Avery, a supporter of the early Republican Party, for his infusion of money toward the education of blacks at home and in Africa.
Pisciotta writes that Avery’s contemporaries “portray him not as a shrewd investor, which must have been the case, but as a devout evangelistic Christian leader and exceptionally generous philanthropist — the very model of moral conscience in control of the capitalist drive of self interest.”
Today the Republican Party offers us Donald Trump and Trumpism.
What’s the point of a Greek life research center?
With respect, I’d like to take issue with this idea of a research center to study Greek life. If you name it after Piazza, that means its function is clearly to prevent further crime. If that’s the function then, why not just simply say that any crimes in Greek life will be punished according to current law? Is drinking under 21 a crime? Then, a frat that openly permits it should be shut down. Why do you need a center to study that? End of story.