Secretary Clinton, I know you've got a lot on your plate - and a blathering, dangerous idiot to deal with as an opponent - but I need you to put all that aside for at least a moment. It's time for you to check in and familiarize yourself with the events in Cannon Ball North Dakota, specifically involving the #StandingRockSioux and thousand of #NativeAmerican tribes, friends and allies, as they stand and oppose the #DakotaAccessPipeline (#DAPL).

The issues touch at least 5 planks from your platform; the events have been escalating, illustrating bad faith on the part of the pipeline company and injuring the folks standing peacefully in opposition.

You need to speak out about this.

Right now.

One of the planks from your platform is “Rural communities.” Note that you can’t get much more rural than Standing Rock Reservation or Cannon Ball, North Dakota.

The folks here have a legitimate, serious concern. It’s serious enough that thousands have joined with them to oppose and prevent further threat to their water and resources.

Another plank from your platform.

You must be familiar with the amount of racism often leveled at Native Americans, and the extent to which they’ve endured racial injustices over the past two centuries. If not, that’s not entirely hard to understand: Native Americans are often invisible. It’s not magick, exactly — it’s a psychological thing. And it’s not a “them” thing, it’s an “us” thing. The phenomena is called “Invisible Indians” — it’s unfortunately quite real, and it often leads to long stretches of racial injustices going on unchecked until the outcry rises beyond normal human bounds — or results in blood. Usually both. Like what happened recently in North Dakota, for example.

Climate and energy — both part of a third plank from your platform.

Climate change is an easy term, but difficult definition. It’s not simply “carbon dioxide” — and it’s not simply “global warming” (although that’s an effect). Climate change, in the context that matters, is the impact to climate by humans through human-wrought changes to the environment. Climate change is essentially “human-caused climate disruption” — and that includes environmental issues like pollution, poisoning and destruction of land and water resources. Energy is a critical element of our society and culture, and clean energy is what your platform proposes to place front and center during your administration. Oil is not clean energy. And pipeline often leak, destroying or at the least seriously disrupting the environment and ecosystems around them.

National Security isn’t just something that happens outside our national borders: it happens within, as well.

Fighting, opposing, and mitigating the risks of externally spawned terrorism is only one part of it.

Another part includes quelling domestic terrorism. And, to an extent, certain acts by corporate entities can now qualify as acts of domestic terrorism. Perhaps that would include acts of intimidate that are cruel and unusual, like using attack dogs against citizens peacefully assembled to oppose a corporation or to protect their sacred sites, their water, and their land (as well as adjoining land and water). Perhaps the definition for “domestic terrorism” doesn’t go that far, and those actions by the pipeline security folks are simply criminal in nature. At least. Hopefully.

Finally, “Economy” — the fifth plank of your platform that is tangentially connected to the events in North Dakota.

How can projects by wealthy interests, which are forced upon the economically challenged, be fair, or said to be “working for everyone”…?

In essence, it probably can’t be.

There they are: five (5!) planks from your platform that are touched by these events. Several others have started to speak out on the Dakota Access Pipeline, and shown solidarity for the Great Sioux Nation, and their friends and allies.

Where is your voice, Secretary Clinton?

What do you have to say?

We’re listening.