If you believe ... (an open letter to my Republican family and friends)
If you believe ... (an open letter to my Republican friends, family and acquaintances, and my apologies ahead of time to those of them who no longer recognize or respect their party either)
As we near the most important election of our lives (because it is the next one), I want to ask all y’all a few questions about what you may believe, suggest what those beliefs might say about you and how those beliefs comport with my own. I hope that you will read this note in the spirit in which it is intended and that you will respond in kind. Perhaps I know you because of an accident of random proximity or relational birth, or I may know you because of some real and lasting affinity on one or (maybe) many dimensions of our lives. Regardless of how, right now I would like to know why you may still consider voting for the latest mismatched, malevolent set of white boys who wear what’s left of the frazzled and frayed mantle of the Party of Lincoln. Because if you believe that Romney and Ryan are the best choice available to you (to us) to steer the course of our shared home, our cherished land, for the next four years; then, from where I sit, you may also believe other things that, to me, are pretty unbelievable. Tell me it ain’t so, or that it is. Then we can both decide where we (much less our country) should go from here.
If you believe ...
... that money is the root of all meaning, then perhaps it is time for you to replace Jesus as your moral and spiritual teacher (He who taught us that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven) and replace Him with Gordon Gekko (he who exhorted us to operate on the notion that greed is good).
If you believe ...
... that some Americans should be denied the right to vote, or discouraged or mightily inconvenienced from doing so, because their beliefs or incomes or genetic makeup differ from your own, then perhaps it is time for you to forego Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton as your political role-models and replace them with Richard Daley and George Wallace.
If you believe ...
... that women are inherently inferior to men, that they are incapable of making proper decisions within any arena (including within the sacred temples that are their own bodies), then perhaps a better home for you might be Saudi Arabia or Somalia.
If you believe ...
... that the credit for whatever you have accomplished in your own life is due only to you, then perhaps you should relocate from whatever village you now inhabit in favor of an island for one.
If you believe ...
... that an accurate and honest measurement of the consent of the governed is no longer the only real and lasting basis of legitimacy for all our governments in this country, then perhaps you should admit that the intellectual architect for the secret software now being used in our unverifiable voting machines was Josef Stalin.
If you believe ...
... that it is appropriate to be against both unimpeded access to birth control and a woman’s right to choose, then perhaps you still believe that population growth is the only real engine of our economy (an 18th century notion), that it is not educational opportunity (a 21st century fact).
If you believe ...
... that only one political platform and position is supremely inspired and ordained, then perhaps you should learn to promote your political perspective using a North Korean dialect.
If you believe ...
... that might makes right, that lending a hand to those less fortunate than yourself is less appropriate than carving them up for your next meal, then perhaps you should fire up your barbeque grill and invite your Neanderthal kinfolk over for dinner.
If you believe ...
... that your minister should be able to dictate the righteousness of one political perspective over all others and not be held to account in this country for that blatantly un-American behavior, then perhaps your real “church home “ is a Taliban congregation.
If you believe ...
... that it is time to purge your party of its few remaining egalitarians (like Lincoln) and conservationists (like Roosevelt) and those who warned against the excesses of corporate greed (like Eisenhower), then perhaps you feel you need to do so in order to make room for more racists, Dominionists and corporate “persons”.
If you believe, ...
... like Paul Ryan, that rape is simply another “means of conception”, then perhaps you too (like your Vice Presidential nominee) were conceived via anal intercourse.
And, finally, if you believe ...
... that there is something fearful or inferior or foreign or unforgivable about allowing our country to be led by someone whose own parents came in very different skin tones, then perhaps you also believe that my own grand God-daughter, Grace, should be forever branded and burdened by the benign beauty and brains of her own blessed biracial beginnings.
Ok, now, I’ve said my piece. Tell me true – did I get it right, even once, when I endeavored to connect the dots between what appear to be your beliefs and the logical consequences of them? If I did, then tell me now, how do you call yourself a God-fearing believer or an American when your beliefs strip you naked from our flag while you grind your own Bible in the dirt?
Don’t get me wrong. Like everyone else in this free land, your beliefs are insufficient in themselves to deny you continued residence in this, our shared country. But they should, in my humble opinion, never be allowed to prevail in our body politic, at least not if we hope to protect the promise of America. Or if you care to keep my kinship, my friendship, my faith in you.
I believe in liberty for all, in courage, in freedom, in the strength and eternal stamina that comes from the awareness that we are all God’s children, that the democratic commons (the consensual democratic process) is the best political system to acknowledge and honor the fact of God’s grace. If, in the final analysis, you do not share those beliefs with me, then please un-Friend me and forget forever that we come from the same extended family of once and future Americans. As I will if, heaven forbid, we fail to protect and defend the ideals on which our nation was founded and we face each other on some distant, or soon-come, battlefield. Because, if that sad time should ever come, I am confident that the strength and soundness of my own beliefs (as well as the massive numbers of patriots who share them on my side of the political abyss) will grind you and your ilk up and spread your sparse dust in the dirt beneath the arc of historical justice.
Where it belongs.
Peace out. Y’all come. (Or not.)
= new reply since forum marked as read
In addition to being the most beautiful little girl I know, she is the reason I will never stop fighting to protect the promise of America.
glad you got it worked out.
good to see you posting! it is very difficult to see how anybody can follow the ideology of the current repuke incarnation and it is depressing to think about how many are in the seats of power. Vote. It matters.
