Project 2017: Justice, Peace & Planet

Letters

11/13/16

A Letter to a Trump Voter Friend:

We must find the strength to re-dedicate ourselves to fight for justice, knowledge, compassion and love

Hard to imagine right now, but it is the now urgent task at hand

The hate Trump spreads clearly is evil, fundamentally un-American and anti-freedom.

I don’t believe we’ve ever had a president who advocates war crimes, shutting up the free press, jailing his opponents, creating religious tests and saying that he alone can fix this. That is the territory of Hitter. I do not believe Trump is currently a Hitler. But the slope toward totalitairianism is a steep downhill slope.

I’ve been disappointed in elections before, many times. But Trump is not a Republican, he is unbalanced and probably suffers from some personality disorders.

We will see, because this train wreck is going forward because of the un-democratic electoral college, setting up huge battles over issues the country has already decided, and will turn around when he is gone. But our institutions transformed by Trump will battle the will of the people during his administration, and well after he leaves his mark, in ways that might shatter the very core of this country’s belief in itself. He is looking at the same old chicken-hawks for his national security team.

The Supreme Court is a prime example. Freedom means freedom.

You can’t tell somebody what type of human to love and marry. That will be gone.
You can't ban abortion and expect young girls to not get butchered by garage abortionists.
You can’t mask racism under law and order and not cause destructive social disorder.

There may well be other issues where you and I will agree on past overreach. We should not penalize people without medical insurance, we should simply cover everybody. The cost to the economy would be less than it is now and the blood-sucking insurance companies can downsize to just offer premium stuff to rich dudes.

This is what is filling my head right now. I hope to be surprised. He has a positive inclusive opportunity. I doubt he will use it. He lost the vote, he has no mandate, but he does have the office. He must find a way to respect the views of the majority of votes that lost him the election while winning the presidency with the hugely un-democratic electoral college. The last time this happened we got a war in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of people, cost trillions and hurt us deeply as a nation.

Stephen Johnson
Human, Planet Earth. Citizen, United States of America.