An Open Letter to President Obama About the Tar Sands Arrests

Below is a statement openly released to the public at Virginia Kennedy (#4): An Open Letter to President Obama About the Tar Sands Arrests.

Dear President Obama,

My name is Virginia Kennedy. I am a fifty-year old mother of three. I was one of 65 citizens arrested in front of your house – my house really, the country’s house – the Whitehouse, on the first day of the Tar Sands action, Saturday August 20th, and kept in jail for the weekend. We spent the weekend in jail because we asked you to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline. To reject tar sands oil, the extraction of which is destroying Indigenous people’s lands and lives and decimating arboreal forest lands. The oil which if extracted and burned will mean, in the words of your NASA climate scientist James Hansen, “game over for the climate.” That’s game over for my children, for your children, for everyone’s children.

Just so you have the full picture, I was in a holding cell with twelve other women who participated in the action. Most of these women were not perennial activists. Many had never participated in such an action before. These women from ages 20 to 70 were retired schoolteachers, grandmothers, college students, a pilates instructor supporting her husband in graduate school, working women supporting themselves or supporting families. Every one of whom decided that this is the issue of issues because we are talking about the earth itself, the viability of human life on our planet, a planet we are irreversibly harming. They decided they had to join with all the other voices who are trying to make you listen and trying to give you courage to take this step; to take this stand against the fossil fuel industry – the moneyed interests that regularly demand you yield to them.

And more of the picture, Mr. Obama, we were in a holding cell for the majority of the time. A freezing cement cellblock with no windows and one solid metal door, no way to see out. No blankets. Nowhere to lie down. An open toilet in the corner. Glaring fluorescent lights that never dimmed. We were kept without food or water for 18 hours. And then given bread, cheese and water every twelve hours after that.

I want you to know I thought about you a lot during those long hours. I wondered about the power you have or maybe don’t have. Maybe it has just gotten impossible for any politician to stand up to the brutal, greedy bullying of the fossil fuel companies. Or maybe you don’t want to.

I wondered how I could be in a jail cell with a group of women who were guilty of nothing but trying to get their president to listen to them, to listen to reason. Women who stood peacefully with a whole group of citizens who said we want clean energy. We want an end to oppression by a fossil fuel industry that wants the world to believe we have no choices but the choices they want to give us.

I wondered if you knew about Tim deChristopher, the young man in jail for two years for posing as a bidder in an auction, in order to save thousands of acres of public lands from being auctioned to mining companies. The auction itself was found to be illegal. No consequences for that, though. I wondered if you ever think about the 11 dead men killed in the BP Horizon disaster, the 29 dead coal miners dead at the Massey coal mine, the reports of negligence, the environmental decimation, all the lives and livelihoods destroyed. Not one indictment. No repercussions really at all. A few dollars lost, then back to business as usual. And then there is us, tax-paying, law-abiding folks freezing in a filthy jail cell for standing politely in front of the Whitehouse and asking for clean energy. For asking you to do the right thing. For trying to give you the courage to do the right thing for your daughters, and for ours.

I thought about you together with your family in Martha’s Vineyard while we were body searched, shackled, and paraded ankles chained into a federal prison cell to await our time in front of a judge while our families worried about where we were; what was happening to us. I wondered how you’d feel if Malea or Sasha ended up in such a situation for such an “offense”, what that would inspire you to do.

I wondered if you ever spent any time in the DC prison right in your front yard, filled with mainly African Americans of every age, some of whom are legitimately bad news, but many, many of whom are guilty of nothing much more than being caught in the terrible cycle of poverty and defenselessness generated by a system that would jail them instead of supporting their rights, their education, or their humanity. A system that would incarcerate a poor woman for being drunk on the street and reward a CEO ultimately responsible for the deaths of his own workers with more and more profits.

I wondered who you are, Mr. Obama, what your values are. Because I can’t really tell. I hold out hope you’ll send a signal and reject this pipeline because I have to hold out hope. But, contrary to that famous slogan of yours, since you came on the scene, there hasn’t been too much change, and you do not make hoping easy.

Virginia Kennedy

See also Is Bush a better environmentalist than Obama? and Shall we put on our "Pudding Face" for environmentalism? and How We are Past Peak Oil and Obama gave US Sovereignty to BP and We See the Merging of the War on Science and the War on Whistleblowers and Tar Sands Action: “Fight, Fight Fight!” and Did Obama Order Tar Sands Protesters Jailed? and Concealed Weapons against the Environment (how congress - with no objection from Obama or the democrats - is working to undo all the progress we have made since Theodore Roosevelt formed our National Park System in the 19th century) and Federal Work Suspension of Leading Arctic Scientist Ended as Investigation of His Investigators Deepens and State Department Environmental Impact Study of Keystone XL Pipeline Released, Skids Greased for Approval and As U.S. Energy Companies Blow-Up Appalachian Mountaintops, the Nation's Lawmakers Yawn With Indifference and President Obama and Governor Perry–Twins separated at birth? and Obama's EPA Once Again Disappoints Environmentalists and Why My 9-Year-Old Niece Is Smarter Than Our Genius President and Sun and Sanity and State Department concludes Keystone XL has ‘no significant impacts’ and Obama halts controversial EPA regulation and Did the White House double-cross its supporters on the smog rule? and Kochtopus is big winner if Obama approves pipeline and the people lose and Greens Blast Obama’s Capitulation to GOP & Oil Lobbies on Tar Sands Pipeline, EPA Smog Regulations and 9 Nobel Laureates Urge Obama to Reject the Keystone XL Pipeline.