To the editor:
Though under a relentless assault, Lady Liberty and the institutions of government she has watched over have not been banished from our shores. Yet there is much to be concerned about.
From my point of view, the cry to “Make America Great Again” is a false flag. Rather, we should fight: to Make America America Again, to honor the rule of law, and to give thanks for due process. We must disavow those who, rather than embracing our diversity, tremble with fear at giving everyone the same chance to grow and prosper in an atmosphere of freedom and equal opportunity. We must rise up in outrage when books are banned, when government banishes science and replaces it with quackery. Based on this last absolute insanity, some of us will lose loved ones. Some already have.
We must embrace the competition of diverse people and ideas, not cower in fear of them as so many do today. How else can one explain their frantic, baseless pretexts based on empty, unsupported fraud claims made to justify disenfranchising American citizens from their fundamental right to vote? They are breathing new life into zombies like Jim Crow, and literacy tests and intimidation. To those smart enough to understand history, the book banning, the censorship of ideas with which we may disagree, the abandonment of the rule of law are an idiot’s recipe for the death of everything that made us and kept us free and great.
We will either fight for the America of hope and opportunity or we will descend into a maelstrom of chaos and fear. Unless you are blind or living in a dark cave somewhere, you must know that that descent is well under way. We must expand access to the ballot box rather than relying on lies to make voting for certain groups more difficult, or we will one day all be condemned to arbitrary, thoughtless tyrants who believe their way is the only way.
Whoever you are, is your vision of a great nation really one where anonymous, masked, armed enforcers descend on individuals, judges, and senators, cuff them, throw them to the ground, remove them to places unknown, ship them to forbidding foreign locations, often places from which they fled to seek asylum in America, thus almost certainly condemning them to torture or death? This is what dictators do. In Chile, it was called the “Disappearing of dissidents.” In Russia under Stalin, it was the Gulag. In Hitler’s Germany, it was the Gestapo. In Donald Trump’s America, it is ICE.
When lies TRUMP facts, when science dies, when fear is the emotion of the day, when cowardice infects so many of our elected officials who are paralyzed by the cult of the leader, the tipping point to darkness draws closer and closer.
Douglas A. Cooper
South Egremont
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