Op-Ed Vote for working together

Author: Julia Alvarez

On Nov. 6 and 7, Dedé Mirabal and Minou Tavarez Mirabal will be visiting our campus, sponsored by WAGS and several other departments and organizations.

For those who might not know, Dedé Mirabal is the sole survivor of a family of four sisters, who started the underground movement in the Dominican Republic against the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. In 1960, they were ambushed on a lonely country road as they were returning from visiting their jailed husbands. Their murder was instrumental in bringing down the 31-year dictatorship. Almost a quarter of a century later, the United Nations declared the day of their murder, November 25, International Day Against Violence Against Women.

Minou Mirabal, the only daughter of one of the murdered sisters, Minerva Mirabal, has grown up to serve her country as a senator, pushing for reform in government and advocating for the rights of women and the impoverished and under represented. She is a true inheritor of the legacy of her mother and her aunts, known affectionately by Dominicans as the Butterflies, from their code name in the underground, Las Mariposas.

I bring up their visit because it concurs with our own election day, November 7, in the U. S. The sacrifice of the Mirabal sisters reminds us all of the high price for freedom and the privilege of being part of a democracy where we can elect the officials who represent us.

In honor of the men, women and children around the world who have sacrificed their lives in the name of freedom, I urge all students, faculty, and staff to please vote in this coming election.

This is such an important one! We desperately need a change in Washington! An unpopular war, nuclear nightmare on the horizon with Iran and North Korea, feminist gains reined in by a Supreme Court that is taking us back to pre-Roe vs. Wade days, health care that is so astronomically expensive it is impossible for many Americans to purchase their own insurance if their employer does not provide it, a deplorable and immoral disregard for environmental challenges like global warming, an immigration policy that is antiquated and fear-based and brands a whole population of much-needed workers as illegals without the inalienable rights which our Declaration of Independence states belongs to all human beings - this is the direction the current administration and congress has led us in.

I heard Peter Welch make a statement which really helped me to understand this coming election in a new way. Think of this race as a referendum on the conduct and policy choices of the Bush Administration and the National Republican Party.

"We are challenging a philosophy, the Bush philosophy, that says you are on your own," Welch explained. "My goal is to replace it with the one that has worked for us in Vermont: we are all in this together."

That philosophy was the one which also inspired the Mirabal sisters to sacrifice their lives and which continues to inspire Dedé and Minou in their efforts to evolve a democratic, transparent, grassroots-based political tradition in the Dominican Republic.

Peter Welch for U.S. House, Bernie Sanders for U.S. Senate, Scudder Parker for Vt. Governor seem to me to best exemplify the philosophy of "we are in this together" with a long track record of peace-focused, environmentally-sound, humanitarian service to their grassroots community of Vermonters, Americans, and the larger human family.

Long live the Butterflies!

JULIA ALVAREZ
WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE
Middlebury College