Dear ________,
Whatever you think of my wish that the Green Party not complicate this particular Presidential election—and I know you and many other Millennials don’t agree with me, fed up as you justifiably are with both major political parties—please understand that I do care about your future and the lives of the rest of your generation and the generations to follow. And that includes the daughters.
I do not for a moment wish to underrate or dismiss or minimize the hurt and damage and pain and disrespect the sexual abuse of women engenders. My mother was a woman. My wife is a woman. You are a woman. It pains me deeply to think that you have been subjected to this kind of abuse. Last year I broke off a friendship of over thirty years in large measure because I could no longer bear the man’s disrespect for women, his serial philandering, and his disparagement of the Me Too Movement.
But to equate the lifetime history of abuse of women by Donald Trump with something Joe Biden may have done over thirty years ago—when weighed against the damage Donald Trump has already caused this nation and the world, and will continue to cause if he is reelected—seems to me out of proportion.
I don’t really much care what happens with the rest of my own life. I have been able to brush off this cancer I’ve been battling, for instance, because I’m not really all that eager to go on living anyway. Most of what I have hoped for and worked for over the course of my life has come to nothing. The world and my country are worse off now than they were when I was your age. It certainly isn’t my future I give a rat’s ass about because there isn’t much left of it.
It is your future that really does concern me. If you think the two parties are tweedle dee and tweedle dum, consider who the Democrats have appointed to the Supreme Court during your lifetime:
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Stephen Breyer
Sonia Sotomayor
Elena Kagan
And the Republicans?
Clarence Thomas
John Roberts
Samuel Alito
Neil Gorsuch
Brett Kavanaugh
Ginsburg is going to be very lucky to survive as long as January 2021. She has no chance of surviving another four years of a Republican administration. And if Trump gets the next appointment, that will make the court an insurmountable 6-3. You can kiss Roe v. Wade goodbye, along with a lot of other fundamental freedoms and liberties.
Moreover, Trump and his minions in the Senate have been appointing scores and scores of equally odious judges to lifetime appointments at the district and appellate levels, packing the entire federal judiciary with rightwing ideologues who are even now in the process of reversing every progressive gain made since the Warren Court when I was a youngster.
Under Donald Trump, the deterioration of the very fabric of our nation is occurring at hyper-speed. Trump has dismantled and eviscerated the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Election Commission, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, the Justice Department, and the Department of State. And that’s not the half of it. He has repeatedly thumbed his nose at the Constitution, and repeatedly gotten away with it. The so-called U.S.A. PATRIOT Act was bad enough, but Trump has reversed, nullified, or thrown out literally all of the civil and legal protections provided for ordinary citizens so painstakingly won over the past ninety years.
Moreover, he genuinely seems to think that global warming is fake news, and is not only doing nothing to slow it down, but actively supporting and activating policies that are only increasing the impossibility of ever reversing the situation. You think I’m not thinking about your future? I’m not going to be around when this particular hammer comes down. It isn’t my future I’m worried about.
I am not a Joe Biden fan. I supported Bernie Sanders with my writing and my money right up until he withdrew from the race. I am underwhelmed that Joe Biden is who I’m going to have to vote for. But Trump is in a league of his own. Like no other President in my lifetime, he has actively promoted the services of, and openly encouraged the support of, misogynists, racists, and bigots. Over the past three and a half years, I have come to believe that another four years of Donald Trump will render your future something very close to untenable, and perhaps even uninhabitable. I am not convinced that the damage he has already done can be reversed. I am certain another four years of this disaster will be fatal to just about everything you and I care about.
Vote your conscience. I would and will never tell you not to. But I won’t apologize for writing to the Green Party and asking them to step aside this time around. I am not trying to silence them or dismiss their concerns. But I am terrified that Donald Trump will be reelected. I believe this election really is, for the first time in my life, well and truly not a time for a protest vote. I am seeing profoundly disturbing changes in this country unlike anything in all my 71 years. And I will say this one more time: it’s not my future I’m terrified for. My future is already history. You are who matters.
I love you,
Dad
W.D. Ehrhart has voted in every election—general, primary, and special—since he first became eligible to vote in 1972 (he was not allowed to vote during his time in the U.S. Marine Corps because the voting age was then 21: old enough to kill, not old enough to vote—yet people think it was the antiwar crowd who disrespected returning veterans).