HEADING TO A DANGEROUS FUTURE
These are troubling times we live in. Despite a robust, growing economy with historically low unemployment and inflation coming down from highs created by a world-wide pandemic, tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy, and exorbitant corporate profits, the American voters chose to make a change.
Many of those that voted for the convicted felon, gave in to their base racist and narcissistic characteristics. He appeals to the worst among us and even the worst tendencies of some good people among us. He and his closest followers follow the same playbook used by a small man with a strange mustache in Germany during the 1930s and 40s.
He and his followers are not what I know to be Republicans. Neither are they true conservatives. They are certainly not Patriots who believe in what America stands for as spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They are power hungry, white supremacists who want America to go back to a time when anyone who wasn’t a white, protestant male was a second-class citizen who were kept in their place.
To those of us who are troubled by the actions of our newly elected convicted felon president and his minions, I am called to quote Richard Goodwin (an aide, advisor and speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy during the 1960s):
“Some have called upon us to mute or stifle dissent in the name of patriotism and the national interest. It is an argument which monstrously misconceives the nature and process and the greatest strength of American democracy … . It is not our privilege but our duty as patriots, to write, to speak, to organize, to oppose any president and any party and any policy at any time which we believe threatens the grandeur of this nation and the well-being of its people. This is such a time.”
Mr. Goodwin was speaking of the increasing involvement of America in the Vietnam War. But his words ring true today in these perilous times and of this most dangerous man now leading our great nation toward a very dangerous future.