7.4.2020

Today I need to say something about the political situation here in the USA. I want to engage with my fellow Americans and the people of the world in a spirit of “deliberate generosity and purposeful temperance”.

On my computer this morning are images of American citizens resisting the American president in the Lakota Black Hills. I see soldiers again pushing Native Americans off of the land promised to them by treaty in perpetuity. The president poses as though he feels his image should be carved into that Lakota mountain and exalted above and beyond our nation.

It sickens me to see this man elevated to power by my fellow Americans. But today I will not be addressing Donald Trump. He is a horrible symptom of a sick society. I will not hate, but I do not think we can heal until he goes away.

And so he must go away.

My business today is with my fellow Americans. How can we rise above this gross perversion of our great country?

I want to be generous to you as I listen to your concerns. I want to act with temperance when I find that I must oppose what I consider to be your misguided and mistaken efforts. I want us to find and celebrate and amplify the common ground and common purpose I know we hold and cherish.

I want our children to be able to live together in peace.

Is it possible to isolate and gain mastery over the worst of our impulses?

I live in Michigan, where not long ago belligerent men came into our state capital in Lansing with military weapons in order to coerce our state government.

We in Michigan are being extorted. We have implicitly been told that we must give up our American ideals of government for and by the people or these paramilitary extortionists will unleash their deadly weapons upon all that resist. It would be naïve to assume these intemperate elements of our society are just posturing or playing macho games. I have seen the atrocities our species is capable of. Auschwitz. Sand Creek. There are, unfortunately, many other examples. Such things really do happen when the tides of history overrun the levees of decency. That’s where we stand today.

Can we back away from this precipice? For it is a precipice. A second American civil war would be a horrible tragedy. People I love and people you love would be slaughtered. The whole ideal and edifice of government for and by the people could be swept from the face of the earth.

The stakes are high. And we are better than this. Let me stand with deliberate generosity. Let me stand with purposeful temperance.

In that spirit, here I stand.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.