A letter to my children on Inauguration Day
Dear Izzy & Louie,
Today is Inauguration Day — Jan 20, 2017. Donald J. Trump was just sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America. You are both too young to understand what any of this means. So I am choosing to write these words down for you today in the hopes you’ll read them in the future and know exactly where I stood.
Here’s a true story: In 1997 my friend Ross and I took the 1 train from 14th Street to Columbus Circle en route to Central Park. When we exited the subway station, we found ourselves standing directly across the street from the Trump International Hotel and Tower which had just recently opened. The gaudy, gold exterior was viscerally offensive. The type of building that only a child who had been yessed to death by sycophants could dream up. The sun reflected off the shiny yellow beams creating an unpleasant glare, causing us both to squint. Reflexively, Ross and I, in unison, standing on the sidewalk of Central Park West, gave the Trump International Hotel & Tower the finger.
If you had told me on that day that the man responsible for this architectural nightmare would be elected President of the United States, I would have thought you crazy. He loomed large in New York. A tacky, vile, wealthy buffoon whose marital strife, business deals, failing casinos and permanent state of schadenfreude were all grist for the tabloid mill. But, alas, he has been elected. It has been debated ad nauseam as to how or why this happened. There are many theories. He is a polarizing man, with polarizing ideas who ran for the highest elected office in a polarized country.
His message, “Make America Great Again” resonated deeply with people who felt that the country had lost its way. It, like most political slogans, is pretty vacuous. It is an empty promise set on the premise that America was great at an unidentified time, now is not, but will be again. So, if you are a white supremacist who believed that America was great before the Civil-War, or before the Civil-Rights Act, then electing Donald Trump would mean restoring the white supremacist values you hold dear. If you are unemployed, losing your job to automated machines or factory workers in a distant land, then electing Donald Trump, a man promising to bring your job back, would turn back the clock on modernization, industrial globalization and the rise of automation technology, making America great again. It could be that you are a Christian conservative, who favors small government and is unhappy about gay marriage, healthcare subsidies, constitutionally protected abortion, perceived threats to the 2nd amendment, environmental regulations, and the fear that jihadist Islamists and Mexican immigrants are destroying the country. So electing Trump means a return to a time when gays couldn’t marry, abortion was illegal, guns weren’t in the news every day and Islamists and Mexicans lived far away.
If you were somebody who voted for Barack Obama, believing he was going to change the circumstances of your life, felt let down, left out and had no enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton, then Trump wasn’t necessarily going to make America great again, but you believed he was the lesser of the two evils.
Perhaps, you’re just somebody fed-up with American politics. Fed up with stagnant wages and elected officials who can’t seem to get anything done. To you, Trump represents a thumb in the eye of the establishment. A guy who will “tell it like it is” and bully the spineless bureaucrats into submission. Maybe he’ll even destroy the whole system. Who cares if he’s qualified? The point is, he’ll usher in necessary change by eroding all the norms of the status quo, making America great again.
It certainly appears that nearly half of all American voters (who bothered to vote) felt one or all of these things. That’s a troubling thing to ponder. The truth is that there’s never been a time when America was universally great. The “American experiment” has always been fraught with tension, inequality, and violence. That it has become the richest, most powerful nation on earth, is a testament to the successes of that experiment. But to confuse that wealth and power with “greatness” is to turn a blind eye to the millions of people America has swallowed up en route to its perch atop the global food chain. That’s not to say that American freedoms, as promised by the Constitution aren’t great ideas. It’s just that if they’re not deployed equally across the full spectrum of its citizens, then America is, and has always been, flawed.
Donald Trump doesn’t care about these freedoms. He’s made that clear. He wants to limit journalistic freedoms, women’s reproductive rights, and immigrants’ rights. He intends to “restore law and order”, a dangerous, albeit vapid, promise, especially to those citizens already deeply affected by state and federal laws that unfairly target minorities.
His speech today promised the rise of a “new nationalism” and asked Americans to “open their hearts to patriotism.” He assured us that we’d always be protected by the military and police forces. These are hallmarks of far-right nationalism and fascism.
I am scared about what he might try to accomplish over the next four years. I fear the growing march of far-right ideas spreading across the globe. He is not the cause of these ideologies. It’s unclear whether he even cares about them. He is merely a bully who only cares about himself. All of his decisions are designed to wreak havoc, to dominate news cycles, ensuring his name is the top story every day. Heaping this much attention onto a narcissist is a zero-sum game. One can’t ever possibly fill an infinite hole of emptiness. There will never be enough attention to satisfy that ego, to allay that emptiness.
I hope to be a positive example in your lives. To be a father who raises you to respect all people, to stand up both for what you believe in, and for the rights of others. Tomorrow, we will attend a protest in Toronto. We will march with many other families and individuals to show our support for the rights of women, immigrants, people of color, the LGBT community, and of the press. It will probably not be the last time we do this. As you get older, hopefully you’ll come to understand not only the importance of voicing dissent, but also the importance of having the freedom to do so. This is what your mother and I will be marching for tomorrow. It’s so important that governments all over the world see their citizens marching in the streets to protect their freedoms, to voice their dissent. These protests don’t always yield the desired results, but the optics of thousands of people marching in protest of the government is powerful and will hopefully inspire others to join the resistance.
Rest assured, we are worried about the future you will inherit. We despise this man taking the oath of office today. It is our right to do so. Many who support him are telling us to “get over it.” We have to accept that he won the election, but we will not get over the things he has said and done on his road to power. It is crucial that we hold him and his cronies accountable. We will voice our dissent accordingly and will raise you to do the same.
With my deepest love to you both,
Dad.
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