Hands off our parks, our foreign guests and our narrative
To the Editor:
In compliance with Executive Order 14253, an official sign has now been posted in the Oconaluftee Visitors Center of our beloved (and already beleaguered) Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and, I presume, at all of the hundreds of other sites overseen by the National Park Service.
The sign enjoins Park visitors to report to those in charge “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.” Comments can be submitted either via a QR code or on the webpage go.nps.gov/eo14253 (which allows a generous 1,600 words). I have taken the challenge and am in the process of sending the following comment to each of the 433 listed NPS units:
To local NPS employees: In the face of the present unconscionable attack on our national park system — with a documented 24 percent of permanent employees and nearly half of seasonal workers “disappeared” — please know that the American people have your back! We understand that the sign now posted at NPS sites reflects the odious E.O. 14253, via internal orders from above, so we do not hold you responsible for its presence or message. Above all, please continue to carry out your important work, and do the right thing, according to your own lights — if possible without endangering your jobs and careers! This dark chapter will play out in due course.
All the following is addressed to Mr. Trump and his henchmen, including the Secretary and other top leadership at the Department of the Interior: All thinking people categorically reject your attempt to enlist us into your MAGA Thought Police! We will not help you to cherry-pick, sanitize, re-interpret and re-write the telling of our complex, often messy American Story, just so you can impose on the rest of us your own blinkered perspectives. Let America be what it is, for God’s sake, “warts and all.” Contrary to Colonel Jessep’s snarling rant in “A Few Good Men,” we can handle the truth!
As for the beauty and grandeur of America’s protected public landscapes, these have never been questioned by anyone! Touting their “abundance,” however, must always be coupled with this understanding: these special places are finite, slowly disappearing and very often critically vulnerable. Thus, your efforts to reduce the thoughtful environmental protections put in place over many decades, and to expand the exploitation of our public lands for the enrichment of for-profit enterprises, for development or the extraction of resources, we likewise reject. These legacy lands belong to us all, and they deserve energetic preservation in perpetuity. They cannot be replaced.
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And, with the latest outrage (Executive Order of July 3), you have seemingly reached a new low: placing a surcharge on foreign visitors to our natural wonders and historic places. Besides being unworkable, the intent and attempt themselves are despicable. Why do you persist in hatefully trying to punish the other in such ways (“The national parks will be about America first!”), especially when you know the logistics are impossible, any attempted implementation will immediately be stopped by the courts, and, more to the point, Americans themselves will not stand for it. We would not expect you to understand, but our America is bigger than that, better than that! You want to profile, interrogate and vet all park visitors according to nationality, residency and/or citizenship status at the very gates of our national park sites — at the “Welcome Center!?” How truly perverse. We reject and will resist the very notion.
Once again, to the dedicated local staff of our NPS sites: Hang in there!
And to Mr. Trump and all his enablers: We reject most everything you stand for, and the ruinous, cruel impacts you insist on imposing upon the country we love. We persist, and resist, knowing that you will all be “out of here” before long — and we actually look forward to cleaning up the chaotic mess you will leave behind!
Tom Powers
Haywood County
