October 24, 2021

Please come to the State Capitol on Friday, Nov. 5, noon to 5 pm: update; new full-page ads for your use; help us get the word out please!

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Previously: (10/11/21): Friday, Nov. 5 at the State Capitol: noon demonstration, workshops & dialogues; help wanted!
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Dear friends --

Good morning. Our last letter outlined plans for a demonstration and workshops on Nov. 5, starting at noon and concluding at 5 pm. That plan remains in place with this clarification: We will NOT be in the Capitol Building because we now think our numbers will be too great for proper social distancing in the limited space of the Rotunda.

So dress warmly! Bring something to drink and a snack as appropriate! We can use the restrooms inside the Capitol. Wear a mask. We don't want anybody getting sick from being at this event.

We have a lot to talk about on Nov. 5. We desperately need dialogue and understanding, so the tone on Nov. 5 will be oriented in that direction. There are a lot of consequential misconceptions in circulation and now policy, as we express in the ads below.

To those who have responded already to our call for help -- thank you! We asked everybody to:

• Sign the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production if you have not already done so. This little act of witness and solidarity is very important. It is not a petition. It is a register of resistance, necessary because there is no other public way to say "no." Each endorsement makes others easier.
  
• Help in getting the word out to your friends and contacts, or in recruiting a participating organization. YOU are our only social media presence these days (there are only so many hours in a day!), so please send links to our ads (see below or here) or these letters if the spirit moves you. We really do depend on you to get the word out.Please don't think we are going to be able to do everything important! Especially in these shut-down, fearful days, so filled with political tribalism.
  

In general, writing to our elected representatives on these issues won't work, unless perhaps you are a major donor or have some other special connection. We are asking those representatives to come on Nov. 5. You could ask them that, of course! Our national representatives have shown themselves willing to ignore hundreds of letters and calls so far. As one staffer in these offices had the candor to say in distant years past, they consider themselves untouchable on these issues in strongly-Democratic northern New Mexico. They don't weigh the merits of the policy issues, as long as they have an excuse to build a nuclear warhead factory complex in greater Santa Fe. Private letters are generally powerless and forgettable. Public letters are more important but still too little. 

To repeat: there would be no plan to build an industrial plutonium operation at LANL without years of promotion by Senator Heinrich and former Senator Udall especially, and then-Congresspersons Ben Ray Lujan and Michelle Lujan Grisham. Bingaman, Domenici, and Richardson never supported such an activity at LANL, as did LANL itself. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its predecessor the Department of Energy (DOE) never supported it either -- until 2018, when the New Mexico delegation and its allies strenuously called for it. Freshman congresswoman Theresa Leger Fernandez fell right in line and opposed preparation of a Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS, which subsequently became something of a dead issue).

Thanks to these officials, we are now dealing with an even more primitive issue: nobody knows precisely what is going on -- including NNSA and LANL, which keep changing their plans, growing them each year and proceeding (despite many warning signals) on "a wing and a prayer." As long as the money flows. That's the main thing, for them.

Thanks to generous donors, we were able to run advertisements in the Santa Fe Reporter this past Wednesday and today, in the Santa Fe New Mexican. You can use these ads however you like. (The New Mexican ad contained a typo: "Quality of life costs money, and New Mexico has been unwilling to pay for it." Those two letters in bold here got dropped. The version on our web site corrects this.)

We will be contacting some of you who have offered to help in the coming days. If haven't contacted us please do. Meanwhile, the main thing we can all do to make this event a success is to get the word out.

To you who got the overprint copies of the first Santa Fe Reporter ad ("Plutonium warhead factory under construction near Santa Fe," Sep 22 and 29, 2021) and have been handing them out -- thank you very much.

Greg, Trish, and the rest of the Study Group gang