Monday, May 02, 2016

My email to Bernie Sanders

Dear Senator Sanders: I am a STRONG Democrat and a believer in most every political policy you hold. I am old enough though to surely remember Ralph Nader and his ruinous third party campaign against Bush. It divided Democrats. It cost THOUSANDS of lives first on 9/11 and then proceeding with the Bush/Cheney ruinous Iraq War dismembering and destabilizing the Middle East. It would not have happened with a President Gore.

If I thought you were the Democratic front runner I would vote for you BUT reality speaks and you are not and I think never will be. It will NOT, one hopes, be a "contested contest" as you aver it will.

I ask you, NO I PLEAD with you NOT to play into media hands by giving them the fuel of discord and division they have seen in the Republican Party and the Trump campaign of which they have taken advantage handing Trump the Republican nomination by infinitely covering him because he is more entertaining. That is NOT how to select a president. Now they look to Democrats to provide them the entertainment of discord which was heretofore the Republican proxy. Do NOT allow that.

PLEASE do not hand Trump a general election victory. Please think about what you say and temper your remarks against Secretary Clinton who will be no doubt our Democratic nominee. Your remarks against her hand the Republican Party just what they want and WILL use all that you say to impugne her.

PLEASE do not let this be a repeat of the 2000 election when defeat was pulled out of the jaws of victory by a divided Democratic Party and progressive movement. Think how different and how many lives would have been saved and importantly what a head start we would have gotten on climate change with an Al Gore as president.

We WILL get the start we need on the ugly reality of man's contribution to climate change by electing the Democrat who will be the most likely nominee of the Democratic Party. I believe that nominee will be Secretary Clinton.

One reaps what one sows and IF you sow discord we will lose this race to the demagogue Trump relegating our nation to a catastrophic fate. We WILL lose lives and many of them through climate change and a reckless even deadly foreign policy by a know nothing god forbid President Trump.

Hillary Clinton has the knowledge, foresight and a plethora of experience to do an effective and professional job as president. As she has said there is more that unites our two political camps than divides us. PLEASE, I beg you, do NOT contribute to Democratic division. Unite us and your followers as only you can do to ensure not only victory to attain this ever so powerful office and election but to see a Supreme Court that finally will decide policy OPPOSITE to what heretofore this right wing extremist court has so destructive to the middle class and the poor bestowed. Justice Scalia is gone. That seat should now be filled with a fair-minded progressive who can make life easier for the poor, the powerless, women and the disenfranchised persons of color. End Citizen's United by uniting us under one Democratic umbrella geared to the probable nominee Secretary Hillary Clinton who will do just that.

PLEASE DO THE RIGHT THING AND UNITE US!
In Harmony,

One of the most interesting opinions I think I have ever read

Andrew Sullivan's piece in "New York" magazine entitled Democracies End When they are too Democratic is one of the most interesting, contemplative, and provocative articles I think I have ever read or at least have read in a long time. His thoughts circulate around Plato's "Republic" written around 380 BC. Yes, it is lengthy, but it is synaptic extending. In other words, it makes one think, expand and exercise one's brain -- a perfect antidote against dementia. I post it below and think you should read it as it is an article written for our fearful Trumpian times inspired by a man, Plato, who could never have envisioned our existence.



http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

We the Living Must Remember

Kudos, to Jeff Jacoby for his thoughtful editorial in the May 1, 2016 Boston Sunday Globe (linked below) entitled "The End of Holocaust Remembrance." There has been no other event in my historical memory that has had more of an impact on me than the Holocaust. The near annihilation of the Jewish people hit me hard as a Jewish child of 10 years old when I watched my first documentary about it as a prelude to a movie in a local movie theater in Framingham.

The sight of human remains pilled like refuse one on top of the other so that those Allies who liberated the camps could do so quickly with bulldozers lest the stench and disease dead bodies could spread would threaten the living was more than a 10 year old child could bear. I became literally nauseated and nearly threw up especially because I, a Jew, was looking at something that could have befallen me. On some level I knew that one of those bodies could have been my relatives had they not had the foresight to leave Eastern Europe for America at the turn of the 20th century. The Russian pogroms against the Jews of the late 19th century from which they fled in a strange way saved my grandparents from an even worse fate that would have befallen them forty years later.

A relative visited Yad Vashem Memorial in Israel and looked up the statistics of my grandparents' small village of Shepatovka, Ukraine from where they emigrated. 50,000 souls perished there. Luckily they were not among them but they surely could have been.

There is no other single event in history that did more to shape my liberal left of center politics than the Shoa as later after considerable thought I knew the extremist right wing spelled fascist inhumanity. I discerned then the difference between leftist politics and those of the right. It is hard, in view of our people's torturous history during that period for me to understand how anyone with a shred of humanity could attach themselves to that side of the political spectrum for which inhuman cruelty is its logical extension.

The Holocaust shaped who I am, what I believe, and shaped even what side of the political spectrum I was to sit. It is hard for me to see how any Jew can feel comfortable taking a seat on the American right with its racist saturated thought even prevalent today in one of our nation's major Parties and the cruel brutality of it in its extreme. For those of us who must and will remember until we ourselves die it is mandatory that we who can only account for what we do never forget our own people's experience at the hands of man's inhumanity to man lest it be repeated over and over again. We the living must tell of it through the ages, always to remember and never to forget.


http://townhall.com/columnists/jeffjacoby/2016/05/02/the-end-of-holocaust-remembrance-n2156601

NOT ANYMORE

  I wrote this last week and for the most part sat on it because I did not want my writing to imply anything against Israel. As stated agai...