I was disappointed but not surprised by Michael Schaffer’s story covering the protest against the loss of home rule in the District (“Demonstration of Impotence,” 9/12). It is typical of the way Washington City Paper smugly views and reviews events that take place by real people in this city. We are viewed as either incompetent, misguided, delusional, or opportunist. Because we had the audacity to organize, attend, speak out, and march against a policy that treats District residents like prisoners of war to an occupying force, we are criticized, belittled, and painted as not getting it.

What the protest showed (D.C. residents are saying but would not register to one who has such preconceived biases) is that just as you can take the land of native people, you can enslave black people, you can discriminate against people of color, women, gays, lesbians, etc., but you cannot defeat us. While we have had our rights as U.S. citizens stripped, we are not a defeated people, and we will fight this with all of our might.

The fact that we have been portrayed as being unable to make good choices when given the privilege to vote for a few offices that the powers that be have so graciously given us is no argument at all. How about removing the right to self-govern for every state that would elect two criminals who had to leave office in shame, president and vice president of the United States in the same year?

Anyway, I think that if you are ever desperate enough to send a reporter out to cover such an event that will write such a biased, uninformed, and minor-league story again, maybe you need to make sure that the writer gets whatever implant he may need in his writing instrument to cure his impotency. That was a piece of crap, which only found the light of day because of the poor standards of your newspaper and/or your publication’s sick need to denigrate anything that comes from citizens of the District. Forget who was on the podium. Look at the marchers, young and old, black and white, Latino and Latina, employed and unemployed, and all committed to the radical concept that in a democracy everyone has the right to self-governance.

Maybe your reporter would have learned something if he had actually bothered to interview people who participated in the rally. Next time we have a rally for our right to be part of the democratic system, send a real reporter or just stay your cynical, lazy, jackleg asses at home.

Columbia Heights

via the Internet