Dear Mr. Trump:
I have several bones to pick with you.
Before getting to the meat of the matter: Thank you for having a fill-in-the-blanks
form on the White House website for use in writing to you. However, it did not allow me to send you this letter. The form accepts only something that would be much shorter, and, besides, it fails to allow this nice spacing between paragraphs so that there is no reading enjoyment for you in a letter's final appearance. I think you will find the visuals of this posting to be much more pleasing to your eye.
Let me introduce myself. In some ways, I am a member of the
demographic to which you hope to appeal:
WASPish, on Medicare, former (now retired) small business owner.
Don’t get excited. I live
in California and am a card-carrying Democrat (at this point, I can’t blame you
for being a bit deflated), I have college degrees, I disagree with you on. .
.well, I cannot think of a single area of agreement with regards to your
conduct as president, and I'll leave it at that. . .and I am the father of a daughter whose mother is a member of a
racial minority.
Being a parent is, of course, an intensely personal
thing. You have children, so you
probably understand that.
Then let me ask you something: How would you feel if a highly visible and
influential public figure were to take some characteristic of one or more of
your children and say that characteristic is such that your offspring should
leave home in America and go live somewhere else? If that public figure were the nation’s
president – yes, I’m speaking about you; this is not hypothetical – would you
feel the stirrings of an increasingly threatening environment that was being
built to “cleanse” the country of people of that characteristic? I am feeling that way; I imagine you would,
too, if the shoe were on the other foot.
And now, if I am understanding what you are also saying –
and I believe that I am – you maintain that it’s really all about people who “hate
our country” because they disagree with you and they say so. After all, you say, you don’t “have a racist
bone” in your body; instead, you blame all this on others who “hate.” As if that makes a difference.
It doesn’t.
In your mind, disagreement equals hate. I have already told you that I cannot think
of a single area about governing policy and practice in which we would agree;
to you, does that mean that I hate the U.S. and should leave for somewhere
else? Apparently so.
Unfortunately for you, our country has a two-and-a-half
century history that says otherwise. You
cannot change that. True enough – that history
includes a lot of evolution in the country’s diversity of cultures and its
acceptance of that diversity, but it is an evolution that in fits and starts,
in two-steps-forward-and-one-backward, has never stopped, and has never been
undone. It’s an imperfect history, but
taken in total it is an honorable one.
But, I guess you think you can change all that. That’s very unfortunate for our country,
because that kind of change will diminish it.
I understand that you are playing a political game here in
conflating racial appearances and differences of opinion with what you label as
too much immigration into the U.S. It’s
your marketing plan for the next election.
Everybody needs a marketing plan, right?
Your plan, though, is hurtful to our country. In fact, upon retiring from
the presidency Ronald Reagan put it this way: “If
we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would
soon be lost.”
(Yes, I know that particular sentence shows up in the recent U.S.
House of Representatives Resolution 489 that has you on edge, but I thought you
ought to know of its origin.)
Your insecurity about disagreements goes beyond the issues
of immigration. But you are the one who
has ginned-up anxieties about immigration, diversity and cultural change, so I
think it’s fair for me to make the connection.
If you insist in trying to change America’s history and
erase its progress, all that you will accomplish is to diminish the nation’s stature
by attempting to make it into some kind of “fortress America” instead of the “welcoming
America” that it had become prior to your presidency. We already know that building on the
honorable successes of the past yields a better future. Doing otherwise results
in diminishment; unchecked, that would end in irrelevancy.
You will fail, because you have now made things very, very
personal and very much about family, country and their combined future. And I believe I say that not only for myself,
but also on behalf of a great many others.
Sincerely,
Garry Herron
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