By Dan Meyer
The Est. collected open letters on Sessions, the recently upheld Muslim Ban, familial separation and the current administration’s response to asylum seekers and immigrants — good grief our collective heart! — to publish on a dedicated landing page as a kind of evolving pastiche of opinions and concerns, anger and empathy. Resistance is vital.
I used to be one of you.
I’m a child of the Reagan presidency.
Since I was 18, I have consistently voted for your party. That’s seven presidential election cycles where you had my vote. And not just my vote, but my support.
You lost it in 2016, but at first that felt, possibly, like a one-time thing. But in 2018, you lost it forever.
I have built my whole life around the value of globalism. I have championed the American pursuits of life, liberty, and happiness.
You are no longer capable of thinking as the leaders of the free world. You have abandoned the majority of your people to side with those who divide, fear-monger, and hate.
Your weakness in the face of tyranny will be judged by history.
Your closed-mindedness has led to a war on people who are mostly poor, mostly innocent, and mostly brown; parents seeking a better life for their families are your targets.
The vicious fallacy known as ‘Make American Great Again’ has done the opposite. Click To TweetYour support of the vicious fallacy known as “Make American Great Again” has done the opposite. In the face of mountains of data showing that immigrants add much more value to our society than they take away, you ignore fact, and spread fiction.
When I was young, I admired the party of Lincoln as what I believed was the original party of diversity. Throughout our history both parties have committed horrible acts of division, but through most of my life, I felt the Republican party ended up getting on board with progressive trends that pushed us towards equality — late and often reluctantly, but we kept striving towards the idea.
That is no longer the case. As a party we have invited in a wide range of racist, homophobic xenophobes who only want to make the divisions among Americans permanent. How can you truly look in the mirror and say you aren’t worried that you’re on the wrong side of history?
Your choice to go along with your leader to put “America First” is quickly making American alone.
We face significant challenges ahead to maintain a public safety net for most of your supporters. You lie to them every day as you take their money and allow them to believe that immigrants are deleterious, instead of educating them on how immigrants will be a vital part of the backbone of the economy and society.
Our farms, our factories, our production plants, our hospitals, and even our tech companies cannot fill all their open positions; we have hundreds of thousands of people desperate to come here to work, work hard, and work in jobs many of your supporters can’t or won’t do.
And instead of integrating them into our workforce, you condone them being put in prisons, watch as their children are taken from them and say nothing; you’ve just given up as the leader of your party leads us into darkness. (And let us not limit immigrants to those who are able to work either, who meet a subjective standard of “worthiness,” we’ve determined.)
You have not just lost my support.
You have turned me into an adversary.
