Letter from Chip Northrup

We Did Not Vote for Nonsense

My high school class sent more graduating seniors to Vietnam than it did to the Ivy League. Louis Grisaffi came home from Vietnam in one piece. His brother Billy didn’t. Jay Neathery served in the Marines, came back, and promptly disappeared into a bottle and an early grave. David Maxfield and Dick Clampitt served and survived, but Clampitt, who had been an officer in the ROTC with me, became a recluse. Like most Vietnam veterans, they are retired now, some dependent on Social Security and Veterans Affairs benefits. Some do social work, like Grisaffi, who returns to Vietnam regularly to support a school. They are all beneficiaries of the PACT Act, which expanded benefits and services to Vietnam veterans as well as to burn-pit victims. DOGE just cut 83,000 jobs at the VA, including all the hires for the PACT Act, which directly impacts my classmates who risked their lives for Uncle Sam.

The late Henry Cooper had three wonderful daughters, Hannah, Molly and Elizabeth. Hannah has been working on a National Institutes of Health-supported study of women’s health issues, including postpartum depression, a debilitating condition that put my business partner’s mother into a mental hospital for the rest of her life. Hannah’s team got a form letter e-mail from DOGE telling her that the research grant was pulled since it had words like “woman, pregnant, postpartum, mental health, poor, and Black” in the description. Their NIH supervisor knew nothing about it. The form letter justified the termination in part as follows:

Worse, so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.

Who do you know that is being trumped to death? A retiree that’s trying to talk to a Social Security agent on the telephone? An undocumented worker that frets her U.S.-born children may lose their birth-right citizenship? A scientist in the middle of a research project? Your alma mater? A retailer struggling with an onerous tariff tax? Your law firm? You know. People like us. We the people that didn’t vote for this nonsense.

Chip Northrup
Cooperstown