As your neighbour to the north and a member of the world community,
we, the citizenry outside your borders, feel compelled to address you at this
critical juncture in your/our history.
We have long tolerated your high spiritedness and have even
envied the Jerry Lewis like way you conduct your lives. You are good natured yet often mean
spirited. You are generous to a fault
and yet your generosity often comes with conditions and strings attached. You espouse liberty and equality yet imprison
a disproportionate number of your poorer citizens and show a decided LACK of
equality between your races and economic strata.
You speak at length about freedom yet your majority are
increasingly yoked by a system that forces you to work longer and harder for
less. Multiple unrewarding jobs and the
resulting lack of quality time with your loved ones are becoming the norm as
you are herded from material obsession to an unfair and unequal tax burden.
And it is about to get so much worse. University studies, the most salient of which
was undertaken at Princeton, show that there
is little or no correlation between what you want and what your Congress enacts
– unless you are rich or a corporation. One need look no further than the current tax
bill which will have been passed by the time you read this. Although the majority of you realize that
indebting your country by a further one and one half TRILLION dollars, mainly
for the benefit of the ultra rich, will indemnify you and your offspring for
decades to come, your President and his co-conspirators actively work to
frustrate your hopes and aspirations. Your
voices, again, are not heard or, worse still, heard but ignored.
With Donald Trump’s unsteady little hand on the tiller, your
ship of state is ploughing dangerous waters on the way to world instability. The obscene amount you already divert to your
military has risen dramatically under this unbalanced buffoon and more is
earmarked for the RESUMPTION OF THE ARMS RACE. This – and I am being presumptuous here – is NOT
what most Americans or world citizens want. This world is scary enough in the hands of the
Dutertes, the Trumps, the Putins, the Netanyahus, and the Kim Jung Uns of this
world without increasing the dangers inherent in a proliferation of world
destroying weapons.
You have been too nice to your unbalanced brethren of the
religious right. Where for decades your
majority have been characterized as devout but not crazed followers of some
deity or other, the rise of fundamentalists has been allowed to ratchet up the
hatred which is inherent in their belief system. Steeped in the Old Testament of barbarism and
misogyny, the purveyors of tainted Christianity ignore the Gospel they pretend
to champion and morph into prophets of hatred, intolerance and
anti-intellectualism.
We, your fellow human beings, can not presume to tell you how
to run your country but we MUST, in good conscience, share our concern for your
welfare and for the viability of life on earth. Spaceship Earth is the only vehicle that we
have to ferry us through the universe and, despite claims of an everlasting afterlife,
which is a crapshoot which many of us refuse to wager on. The animals and plants and, dare I say,
humans, on this beautiful blue marble can not survive the policies of the
current American administration. You and
your loved ones will not survive the megalomania and avarice of the current
President and Congress. It is us or
them. You must find a way, for your sake
and ours, to bring sanity back to your halls of power and your oval office. Each moment you delay will tighten the
shackles around your ankles and those of your children.
Act or risk the spectre of future generations living in
chains – of your children and grandchildren as indentured servants to the manor
house or grubby faced skeletons in the poor house. Your move.
Sincerely,
The rest of us.
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