Letter to the Editor

I am in my 70s, about the same age as the recent letter-writer of “Do School Days Matter Anymore,” a denunciation of students who would take a day off school to protest. I would say just the opposite: take a day off, have fun, don’t let the alligator of schooling chop you up and chomp you down.

I took seven years to graduate, checked out the scene, and decided I didn’t want to spend 40 years hustling and end up with a worn out body and a gold watch and die in a few years. I decided I didn’t want to exclusively be trained to be a cog in an industrial (now knowledge) machine, pay taxes to support a well-oiled war empire and work secretly for a plutocracy of money-eyed elites.

Yet I don’t want to waste my time condemning them any more than the “out-of-town leftist activists” and “leftwing organizers and protestors.” I have no reason to push for greater rifts between earnest people. I want to find solutions, not scapegoats. One year I voted one-third Democrats, one-third Republicans and one-third Libertarians. I have a conservative streak yet I think the Constitution is antiquated. I would like to see the gridlocked two-party system thrown away.

Whatever, it shows the frailty of the puny human mind to see two old men who took years to cultivate options to come out so differently. He thinks school is a savior, I think it is a box. While I am not running scared about the “climate crisis” like the writer is not, I am not about to fall for further blaming and shaming and feeding the “Animosity Monster.”

-Daniel R. Peterson, Bozeman resident