patrick dixon, writer
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A Call for Resistance: A Letter to Liberals and Progressives

11/12/2016

2 Comments

 
This letter is not addressed to Trump supporters, even those of you who voted for him once you got into the booth and couldn’t bring yourself to vote for Hillary. By now,  you know how I feel about you and your support of a man that by many  accounts is a disaster for this country and any semblance of Democracy left within its borders.
 
No, this is for those folks who voted for Hillary even if we didn’t agree with everything she stood for, because we acknowledged what the alternative was. This is for all those who have posted on my Facebook page about how we can’t be obstructionist, should give the man a chance,  how we need to come together now, how you hope he’ll be a different leader than he was a candidate.  Listening to you, I understand your feelings of  reconciliation. The politicians still running the show are pleading for us to come together, and I get that sentiment – I would feel it myself if we had elected almost any other candidate. But not this one.
 
When I listen to such arguments, I feel I am in a bubble of short-term amnesia. Who remembers what the dialogue was two weeks ago among liberals and many high-profile Republicans? Never Trump. America, don’t elect him! He is awful. Awful as a candidate, as a potential leader, as a human being. Several well-respected folks have called him a fascist and compared him to Hitler or Mussolini. And it’s those accusations I want to address here.
 
Do you really think he is any different now that he’s President-elect? What evidence do you have to illustrate your belief? I’m thinking that you are in the act of burying your head deep in the sand. We are better than this has been proven a lie. America is no longer the beacon on the hill we thought it was. I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I’m going to quote Sarah Palin, soon to be (if the reports are accurate) our next Secretary of the Interior: How’s that Hopey-Changey thing workin’ out for ya?  Stick your head deeper, sing Lalalalala so you can’t hear the hate speech already filling the air, and believe away. Donald Trump is STILL Donald Trump. And we are in big trouble.
 
The way to mitigate what is about to happen is NOT to cooperate with him or his surrogates, hoping he’ll turn out to be tolerable. The only way past this is to resist what he stands for with more than our pathetic votes… the ones that WON the popular count, not that it matters. We need to continue to resist in every way possible: demonstrate, scream, yell, post, petition, support the politicians who fight back, support to the marginalized, and NOT go back to our lives, pretending things will be normal again, relying on the politicians to make things better or right. We need to be present and voice our outrage at every turn – and there will be lots of reasons to be vocal in the next four years. Resist. Demonstrate. Stand with Standing Rock. Join the Million Women March on inauguration day. Wear your safety pins. Resist.
 
My wife, the woman I love and have lived with for 40+ years, lost most of her family to Nazi Germany’s journey down this road. Both her brothers, ages 5 and 2, were murdered. Her parents were imprisoned in Auschwitz and somehow lived through that nightmare to survive and emigrate to the USA, then a place of hope and sanity. The election of Donald Trump and all his rhetoric, ideas and beliefs has put us on a merging lane with the Third Reich. I will not forget who he is, what he stands for, who supports him. I will never advocate cooperation or compromise with him. To do so is to accept what is about to happen. To do so is suicide.

2 Comments
Barbara
11/12/2016 01:29:05 pm

Reply
Nomadding Nina link
12/4/2020 06:23:12 am

Hi thhanks for posting this

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    Gillnet Dreams
    ​Patrick Dixon

    I am a poet and writer of creative non-fiction and fiction. I also edit fisherpoetry  for National Fisherman magazine.

    More of my work can be seen at www.IntheTote.com, a site I curate that displays the work of the readers at the annual Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, where I have performed for the past 18 years. I edited Anchored in Deep Water: The FisherPoets Anthology, a seven-book set of writing celebrating the commercial fishing industry, published in August, 2014.

    I write on two blogs, From the Field is about photography and the other is about fishing, life on the water, and really, everything else. That would be Gillet Dreams version one, the earlier version of this one, which has lots of past writings.

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