Politics – Susan Feathers

Change Is in the Air

The things of nature are born and fade away in the rhythm of the seasons. ~ Kenneth Yasuda, from Seeds from a Birch Tree by Clark Strand, p. 33, The Way of Haiku

In the same way as I now feel a subtle shift in the air and light, and walk over a rain of tiny acorns from tall willow oaks, the Americans are witnessing the fall of a dictator and his racist regime. The Trump Administration is applying ever more dehumanization on the public as he feels his own fall from power.

American voters are turning away from the violent and shameful acts of President Trump and the whole of the administration, the Republican led Congress (in lock step with Trump) and the Supreme Court (“courting” Trump’s Executive Privilege). They will all live in infamy in our history.

We have our own Gulag Archipelago across the U.S.A. in detention centers, in hand gloves that deliver extended taser shocks; force feeding detainees on hunger strike in protest of violations of their rights; and in separation of families and children from parents to name only a few violations of human rights. The countries accepting these human beings that America tosses out like trash are participants in our American gulag.

I recall my horror in reading Boris Pasternak’s novel, Dr. Zhivago when I was 16. Sharp in my mind is that Thanksgiving at my grandparents in Tennessee. Even my Grandmother and Grandfather had read it. At the time, my father was a newly retired Air Force pilot. He had been part of the Strategic Air Command which closely monitored Russia in the early 60s. We had returned to Dad’s hometown in the Smoky Mountains where his parents lived in a small hamlet, Watauga. So, at Thanksgiving in 1961, Dad recorded our conversation at the big dinner table with roasted turkey, stuffing and gravy, green beans and pumpkin pie in tow. He had just purchased a Wollensak tape recorder thank goodness, so the sound today is clear as a bell. The discussion included everyone present including my kid sisters whose comments had nothing to do with Russian gulags but which make the tape a family classic. My grandfather’s bass voice resonated as he and my grandmother recalled WWI and WWII and their views on the present day threat of Russian encroachment around the world.

Russia in the 1930 – 50’s penal system – the Gulag Archipelago – was known for torture and as a black hole from which people never returned. Dissidents in particular were sent there which is devastatingly detailed in Dr. Zhivago.

America’s version of the Gulag disappears immigrants and U.S. citizens alike into countries (the archipelago) where their lives are at risk, or where they do not speak the language and have no relatives or friends. These gulags are privately owned and operated by friends of Trump who receive millions of dollars in no-bid contracts.

Our policy is Out of Sight, Out of Mind. Except, in America citizens are making sure they are in sight and on our minds. The laws of America are broken; human rights violations are perpetrated; and the ICE gulag wolves are unconstrained to reap violence and even death in the name of this President and the MAGA Republicans.

In t961, as a young teen, I recall how Pasternak developed an enduring love story set in the 1930 to 50’s Russia while sustaining a sense of dread and loss of freedom. In my wildest dreams I could not have imagined an American political party and President and his cohort of henchmen in the white house, would perpetrate crimes on our own people. Like Hitler, immigrants to this administration are rats and lowlife.

Now, the fall of American integrity, the whole of what we have created together is twirling down to the ground as leaves from a tree in autumn. Our government has become the enemy of the People. .. of Liberty herself.

In just seven decades from my reading of this historic novel, an authoritarian government is in control of the House, the Senate, the President and the Supreme Court. The wolves are devouring the chickens but the roosters have sharp talons. We are in that violent battle now and we do not know how long we must endure the travesties perpetrated on us.

My fervent hope is that a groundswell of voters will coalesce to at least take over the House of Representatives. Already the MAGA forces led by the Orange Menace are brewing up a so-called emergency in our voting system, portraying the opposing parties as Communists and the worst people on Earth. Well, I am one of them, and I assert my will along with millions of Americans that they cannot outlast millions of voters who have known freedom and the rule of law long enough that they will never succumb to such terror.

On Wikipedia, if you search, “The Gulag Archipelago” – a 7 volume summary of an inmate’s journey as an imprisoned dissident in the Russian system of labor camps – there is this quote from the author, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, that sends chills up my spine for how closely it echoes what is happening to immigrants and citizens in America’s detention camps:

Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes….

Boris Pastenak built his novel on The Gulag Archipeligo by tracing Dr. Yuri Zhivago’s life and his love, Lara, during these times. As a young teenager I recall feeling the doom overshadowing this couple’s deep love for each other and the example of their common resistance to the inhumanity of governance under Lenin, another despot who rose on the waves of an ideology that reduced humans to mere fodder.

Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. His novel and poetry was lauded. I recall that in the back of the edition my family purchased, then were many poems by Yuri Zhivago (aka Boris Pasternak), a physician and Russian poet. I memorized many of them and recited them over the years.

Read a Review of Dr. Zhivago from The New Republic.

Doctor Zhivago opens in the first years of the century, spans the revolution, civil war and terror of the thirties, and ends with an epilogue in the mid-1940s. On a level far deeper than politics and with a strength and purity that must remove all doubts, it persuades us that the yearning for freedom remains indestructible.

Freedom, Nation’s Capitol. Photo by Susan L Feathers, 2013

Climate.us

Climate.us is the nonprofit successor to Climate.gov, delivering climate data and information to promote public climate literacy and to equip people to turn knowledge into meaningful conversations and climate-conscious actions. At a moment when critical climate information was being deleted or distorted, we stepped up to rescue key climate resources—including the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s now-deleted Fifth National Climate Assessment—and to ensure the public has continued easy access to the facts. Climate.us

Atmospheric carbon dioxide in parts per million for the past 800,000 years based on ice-core data (light purple line). During that time period, CO2 levels never rose above 300 ppm. A single bright magenta dot on the right side of the image represents 2025 concentrations, 425.7 ppm, the highest on record.

This graph above can be found on Climate.us. at https://www.climate.us/maps-data.

Here is a link to the Climate Dashboard where you can follow indicators of climate change.

Go Here for the Fifth National Climate Assessment clone off the now defunct official U.S. Government website.

Currently there are three employees blowing out each day to keep building the sites’ resources and turning out easy to understand measures about our changing climate, actions that need to be taken to protect the public. If you can, be sure to leave a donation to help them keep our citizens informed and supported to take actions to preserve home and country. https://www.climate.us/donate

Fire and Flood: Earth in Transition

“Any fool can destroy trees.” ~ John Muir, from “Save the Redwoods” essay in John Muir, Nature Writings, The Library of America, p. 830, 1997, N.Y., N.Y.

Study the maps from the Berkeley Climate Monthly Report (previous post on this blog). Study Europe, especially France and Spain. This heat pattern was long predicted by climate scientists yet with all we know, and without any hope of a global effort to reduce heat producing carbon emissions, it may yet all come true and then some.

Heating on land takes human lives, destroys forests whose carbon sequestration is fundamental to the gentle climate we have known for at least the last 10,000 years. We have depended on weather patterns known to us as seasons of the year. Farmers have known these patterns and have planned accordingly.

As agriculture varies over the centuries and location, humans have learned how to extract the most food out of a given piece of land. Extraction from tilling the land we have recently observed destroys the underlying networks of mycelia that are the conduits of water and minerals and the central hub of the lives of millions of microbes and invertebrates whose lives make our abundant foodshed possible.

We are entering a new era of life on Earth. Across the world people and organizations labor to restore ecosystems and to protect species. Notable too are the family by family efforts to plant natives to support insects and birds and other of our kin at risk from climate change, pesticides, and general disruption of their life cycles in their habitats.

In spite of these local or regional efforts, we have passed a point where Earth’s biological systems are irrevocably disrupted by climate forcing that has caused drought, floods, fire, mega-storms and now, these play back on each other for a forcing effect. The fires in the NE USA, Canada, and Europe are illustrative. The fires are so intense now that they are creating their own weather. When this happens, no human intervention can stop them. More people are displaced.

We have passed tipping points now. No going back. This could have been stopped or slowed down had we stuck together across political and social divides but we did not. We know Mother Earth’s creatures are malleable and ultimately able to adapt under favorable conditions. Its still possible that there are things we can do now but they are hard and will need big collaborations to achieve.

This fact has been hard for me personally to acknowledge. Generally, I am an optimist believing there is hope to make change happen soon enough. But those changes, at least in America, have been stymied and denigrated by leaders and some of the public alike. All that fossil fuel lobbying paid off? No one will be unscathed by the coming Earth changes. Nature will endure but in some form we cannot predict nor whether we’ll survive to be part of it. Nature is responsive and ultimately able to change under different conditions.

America embraces capitalism as its economic religion and oath. The vagaries of the system have boomeranged over the decades between the forces of greed and the forces of prudence and justice. In America the forces of avarice and greed are in the White House at present, half the Congress unwilling to stop it, and the other half powerless. Citizens and representatives still in touch with reality are forming coalitions and I feel a groundswell forming to stop them. But when? The world is burning around us. How much longer can rich and powerful people live in altered realities with all their power and wealth? Don’t hold your breath. Better to join with friends and people who DO possess reason and power through the Constitution.

I am not giving up nor are you. There is a growing coalescence among neighbors and communities across the U.S. We can do amazing things together; we can’t stop climate change but we can adapt to it using not only our wits, but also by cultivating a reverence for the Earth we forgot somewhere on the way to “get the gold”.

The reason our culture has not embraced an intelligent relationship with our planet is the way we consider humans separate from other species and the land and waters of Mother Earth. Yet nothing could be further from the truth no matter what some religions may teach. We are a biological species. Our contribution to the whole biota is that we are reasoning creatures and we have an opposable thumb and we make stuff. We could be very useful to Mother Earth by understanding how the natural world works and that we are one among millions of species. I am no fool that that change of worldview could happen in America soon enough, but a great deal of our people are coming to this understanding. So, a major action we can take is to be in a spiritual posture of humility and take actions to undo the conditions that are causing climate change.

We can’t stop it now, but we can mute the impacts and then learn what the new realities will mean for ALL life on Earth and adjust how we live. That is, we embrace and recall reverence for life which our species once embraced. We should turn to the original keepers of North America, the Tribal Nations across this land. We can learn from their understanding of our place in the great panoply of life on this land.

Odyssey: An epic journey

“Even his griefs are a joy long after to one that remembers all that he wrought and endured.”
― Homer, The Odyssey on Goodreads

Americans are flocking to the movie theater and IMAX theaters to watch Christopher Nolan‘s film adaptation of the Homeric tale, The Odyssey. From ancient Greek literature, it is an epic about Odysseus’ journey to return home after the Trojan Wars.

Serendipitous in the modern era? A homecoming to a time when humans lived together with the world’s biota in harmony and reciprocity?

A modern drama as people battle the cyclopes of our political time?

Last night I wrote to key players in an army set to strip America of her democracy, to replace it with autocratic rule: Republican Representative of Virginia. Here is my battle cry hymn:

To Rrpublican Reps in VA Download

Americans we are on an Odyssey like none before in our nation’s history, except perhaps the Civil War. But, I think this time is much more perilous because so much is at stake. While this government is causing havoc everywhere and distracting us from the stabilizing work to keep our children healthy and stabilize climate so they have a future, everything is hanging in the balance.

We are the Odysseus of our time. Let us not fail our kids and grandkids.

Link to an explanation of Project 2025 by the ACLU.

How We See Each Other

“The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality,” Wilkerson writes. “It is about power — which groups have it and which do not.” ~ Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson

America is beset with a wound of spirit. Slavery, or the subjugation of others based on skin color, origin – or any other arbitrary distinction -is an ongoing contradiction in our Constitutional lives yet to be resolved. Today, Black Americans are still struggling for equal representation. Now, with the striking down of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, are we back at the basic question: Do Black Americans have a right to equal representation in voting districts? We are at another make or break moment. Is the Supreme Court right that there is no longer a need for federal oversight of district maps in southern states which have historically worked to suppress the vote of African Americans?

Human beings can be vicious, murderous, and also kind and loving…and everything in between. We are a complex species with potential for good or bad. Our canon of law traces all the clever ways we try to obtain power.

For millennia, humans have sought distinctions that give them a false rationale, stemming their sense of guilt when taking what is not rightfully theirs. More advanced cultures are more tolerant, making judgements based on how people act in various situations.

Much of this wisdom of the ages was on the minds of our founders when we set out to establish a new kind of government based on equality. Yet, most of them owned slaves and denied poor whites privileges who did not own land. Over our history as a nation, Americans have subjugated and disparaged African Americans, Irish, German, Slavic, Italian and Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans. The Constitution and Bill of Rights, and ongoing adjudication in our courts, continues to refine how we live together and who gets a “slice of the pie.”

Listen to a scholarly discussion about the impact of the Civil Rights Act from the National Constitution Center.

Isabel Wilkerson explains in her landmark book, Caste (2020) that she set out to discover the origins of our discontent. In her lengthy study, interviewing thousands of people, the things that divide us the most are not so much color or gender but rather about who’s got power.

In a 2023 interview with Oprah Daily, she was asked about the banning of Caste from libraries across America. She responded, “In writing Caste, I had to do a tremendous amount of research into India and Germany during the Nazi era. The Nazis studied the United States’ Jim Crow laws in creating the Nuremberg laws. We are coming perilously close to the spirit of what they were doing in another century with the banning of books. It’s revisiting a past that we should never want to experience again.”

It seems to me that we are at a new juncture in determining whether a redistricting map achieves the goals of the party submitting it for review: to determine whether it serves to weaken the moral principles of a Republic to achieve a new form of government, i.e. an autocracy based on white male supremacy and Christian Nationalist ideology. Yes, it is a grab for power, but much more, right? It seeks to tamp down the voices of Black Americans who are seen as opposing white power and privilege which for centuries enslaved generations. Sound familiar? I think we are right back at Reconstruction.

What do you think? Please submit comments.

Resources:

National Constitution Center Civil Rights Town Halls on YouTube:

Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice: Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act

Scotus Blog

Brennan Center for Justice

How quickly we forget

When I was a teenager, I would ride my horse deep into the Northern California wilderness. I came of age living in big nature. Given California’s growth and development, that ride would now be impossible. Yet phylogenetically, big nature is deep in all of our psyches. So I began to wonder why we were so rapidly destroying it. Years later at my first job at the University of Houston, I was studying children and parents’ environmental views and values. I found the children knew what air pollution was; but when we asked them if Houston had a problem with air pollution, they said, “No, we don’t have pollution here.” At the time, Houston was the most polluted city in the United States. – Peter Kahn, Environmental Psychologist

Environmental Generational Amnesia (EGA) was identified by Peter Kahn when I was working as an environmental educator. It began to answer my puzzlement about why people could not see the degradation of nature over time.

Kahn explained this phenomenon occurs as each generation takes the environment in their time as the norm.

Now, in America, I am wondering if this phenomenon works with memory of a democracy. We take what is before us as what it has always been.

In Kahn’s recommendations to counter environmental generational amnesia he worked with urban planners, for example, to build in features that allow local residents to experience more robust nature in a built environment.

Could we do the same for each generation to remember and know the origins of our Republic by experiencing aspects of a democratic society through out our lives as The People. Our form of governance is dependent on robust citizen and representative action and participation.

We could start by considering how to identify fairness, developing respectful listening; teaching check and balance by designing situations where kids can participate in situations demonstrate how it works to protect representation, free speech, and other key characteristics of a democratic society.

I recall a teacher in high school who designed his homeroom to function in this manner. He did something else: he taught us the Latin and Greek derivation of many words in our language so that we could derive meaning from root words

Do you agree that a type of democratic generational amnesia may be a force that works to undermine democratic governance which is dependent on individuals possessing more than rudimentary knowledge (i.e. memorizing definitions).

Lest It Slip through Our Hands

There have been 9 generations of Americans since the ratification of the Constitution. Our form of federal governance has been discussed and amended by citizens over our Republic’s history as we labor together to create a more perfect union.

Over the last 80 years however, that “conversation” has gradually intensified until the present moment. The rule of law and civil rights are ignored. Corruption is flagrant. The treasure of America is being raided and spent without Congressional oversight.

Dark money has bored into the election system, causing candidates to find more substantial sources of funding to win a race. Citizens United, one of the most consequential Supreme Court rulings on the election system, has diminished the vote of the people. The rich and powerful have steadily gained greater influence.

The American citizen is the last and greatest bastion of our freedom and justice. But how do we become the kind of citizens who know how to wield power or identify its misuse by our representatives and administration?

I can only share my own experience to describe how I learned about my government and the roles a citizen plays to fulfill his or her obligation.

As a child and teen my parents led discussions at the dinner table about our nation’s history and, at times, of elections and why they voted for a candidate. Often, my mother and father diverged on candidates which was fun with spirited debates. This was how my sisters and I realized the nature of democracy: it is participatory.

In public school, we students learned how and why our form of government was established, and what rights are guaranteed and rules of order. Social studies and civics education was integrated into K-12 education. Debate clubs offered students instruction on how to defend ideas while learning to respectfully listen to opposing views. When Congress functions in this manner it is called bipartisanship. Compromise is the core.

Public institutions further reminded us about democratic behavior. Churches, clubs, libraries, museums, and public leaders across many disciplines modeled how we treat and care for each other as citizens and neighbors. Standards of moral behavior kept the Republic steady. No one is above the law in a democratic nation.

My parents and grandparents also supported our education with expectations we would apply ourselves to learn a body of facts and skills that prepared us to go out in the world. Then, there were generally accepted truths and facts shared by three TV channels. Diversity of thought and opinion were available in numerous print magazines and journals. People read books, journal articles, and local newspapers. We exchanged opinions face to face.

My parent’s love of reading was contagious. Biographies, literature, and poetry – culture from across the world – was brought to us as we read together or listened to discussions. I recall my father reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries out loud on a winter’s day around a roaring fire. How was this possible? There were no cell phones, no social media. And, in our small southern town in Tennessee, no business was open on Sunday. There was time and quietude. We were not wealthy or powerful people. Our relatives were farmers and skilled laborers. They all understood that dreams could be fulfilled with a good public education.

I do not expect that we could or would even wish to go back to those “slow” times, but maybe we might look back to understand how to raise up citizens who are curious, well read, and able to function as a living guardrail to keep our democracy fit and strong.

A key skill is the ability to discern when ideas that are opposed to a healthy functioning democracy rise up as they do from time to time. Today, American citizens can barely make heads from tails with an onslaught of disinformation and outright lies. AI enables citizens to create false videos to fool an electorate. We are all to blame for the mess we are in today.

Should we wish to keep our democracy, we must seriously confront these issues. Working locally to speak truth to power; to discipline ourselves to listen respectfully to ideas you may abhor. But listen we must.

We are the guardians of freedom, of liberty, lest we neglect our obligations and let it slip through our hands.

Capitol Building Rotunda, Photo by Susan Feathers

The Aberration of Pete Hegseth

Here is a man whose whole reason is funneled into killing people and blowing things up. His poses as a warrior, but a true warrior is constrained by ethics and a moral code.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense is constrained under U.S. law and military codes of conduct. These state to whom the power to enter a war resides, how wars are funded and who decides and how long that funding shall be provided. These are all vested in the Legislature (Congress) and are detailed in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution.

Every citizen should have a pocket Constitution to refer to for the proper functioning of our Republic. You can obtain free copies at libraries and voting centers and through nonprofits and U.S. agencies. We should all send a copy to Pete with the section highlighted.

But this is not what makes Pete immoral. He answers only to the President, not to the Constitution, i.e., congressional powers and oversight. Why these laws are in place is no more obvious than when the Executive (the President and his appointed Cabinet and staff) is unhinged. Donald Trump is also ignorant of Constitutional laws and regularly ignores them. He has been aided by a Supreme Court bent toward a powerful Executive Branch in a conspiracy of powers to override Congress.

Pete is one among many in the present fascist cabal that has taken over the American government and holds law abiding members and citizens hostage through sheer audacity and subterfuge. As a whole, this cabal is ignorant of our governance and history, and they operate with delusions of grandeur such as Pete’s posturing as a vicious, all-powerful warrior. His only guidelines are killing and blowing things up. He reminds me of little boys playing war on their bedrooms rugs, gunning down soldiers and throwing bombs to destroy combatants, vehicles and infrastructure. It is madness but it is happening at the highest levels of government in America!

The consequences have spread all over the world, destabilizing countries, fraying or breaking long-standing relationships among democracies. We are now risking the development of a third world war. The deadheads in the White House and the Pentagon envision a “golden age.” Their actions and illusions will create havoc, death, hatred, and loss of civilized order that so many have given their lives to protect over the ages.

Pete is a verified case. Donald Trump is an unhinged man. The Cabal is enabled by Republicans like Lindsey Graham who speaks out of both sides of his mouth as the wind blows. He is a traitor to the United States along with all who aide and abet these aberrant imposters who now control our government and unless we act decisively, our lives.

And have we now forgotten the Epstein files, the Ukrainian war to preserve a nation’s democracy? Lest we do, I am sharing a poem from Ukrainian Victor Kravchuk from his Substack.

https://substack.com/profile/130906845-viktor-kravchuk/note/c-222123213

This is the image of a true warrior for Freedom, Liberty, and decency.

They are Stealing Our History

The first steps taken by the incumbent regime sought to selectively erase American history:

Fired the national Archivist putting the national archives under the watch of the Secretary of State who also holds several other major offices for which he has no training; the minions of fascism bore away in the Archives like termites in channels and holes under no sunlight of public observance;
Deleted web pages of government agencies, replacing articles and documents to reflect a racist, white history and removing all they call “woke” (i.e. racial justice; the mistakes America has made at home and abroad as we have learned how to live up to the high ideals of a true democracy where truth is key; the most egregious are the removal of civil rights struggles over our history, and the multicultural nature of our population from our inception: a. erasure. deletion of language of human rights and therefore human dignity; b. lying about the truth [misinformation] thus disabling citizens of a shared history, shared reality; c. denigration and shaming as a way of instilling fear and removal or disempowerment);
Harassment and legal actions against America’s most prestigious universities in order to make Boards of Governance to bend to their will;
Attacking science institutions and ignoring the illegality of impoundment of funds authorized by Congress.
Harming the public and worldwide population by denial of climate change; removal climate change research and monitoring facilities and staffing; withdrawing from global climate and health agreements and initiatives.
Disempowering political opponents and the public through legal, social media, and law enforcement activities meant to shame and induce fear;
Abandonment of the government’s responsibility to the public to follow the laws and regulations of a democratic Republic through our federal, state and local laws.
Acting against longstanding policies that have created peace among nations with longstanding allies across the world.

I never thought this could happen in the United States of America, but it truly is and we in the fight of our lives to defeat the evil doers in the trump regime that seek to install a Christian nationalist autocracy with unelected fascist ideologues like Steven Miller supported by the Heritage Foundation.

I fault the Republican party which no longer can claim any legitimacy in our Republic, our democracy. They abrogated their claim to moral fortitude by selling out the American people for an ideology inconsistent with democratic values. Indeed, looking over its long pursuit to enslave Americans whom they have long deemed unequal to white Christian males, we have tolerated it long enough. We must turnover this vile, dark element and once and for all declare and reiterate the moral force of our founders’ vision with a new one for modern times including a public awareness of its duty to guard against despots and their sycophants and the utter corruption of wealth in our politics.

Photo by Susan Feathers. A ghost crab on Santa Rosa Island, Gulf Islands National Seashore: sands of quartz crystal washed to sea form barrier islands.

Letter to Congressional Republicans

January 26, 2026

Letter to All Republicans

US Congress 2026

Dear Senators and Representatives of the Republican Party,

This moment requires members of the Republican House and Senate to act decisively to protect the civil rights of citizens and adhere to Constitutional laws. Under your watch, the nation has never been more at risk of becoming another form of government: autocracy.

We the People have patiently waited for you to stand up for democracy. There is no more recent and brazen example as the persecution of Minnesota leaders and citizens. Pam Bondi’s request for voter roles is a clear violation of state’s sovereignty under law. Other cities have endured violations of civil rights by ICE but in Minnesota the worst of the far right ideologues of your once great old party are persecuting people it labels with a host of unamerican labels from elected officials right up to the White House.

We are not dealing with a “strong executive” but with people in key positions of power who have publicly stated their hatred of immigrants and their hatred of Democrats. Whatever happened to a nation in which both Republican and Democratic administrations were adhered to by citizens of all political views because all our leaders followed the rule of law and Constitutional laws.

My view is that we learned who DJT was in his first administration in which he pushed against the laws of our nation but was held in place by our guardrails against a despot: Supreme Court and Legislature. Now we have a stacked court of right leaning judges who have given immunity to a leader who is exactly the kind of person our founders wrote about who if he got into power would destroy the Republic. That is what we are witnessing, and, I have to say, is doing so with a lot of facilitation by you and your colleagues.

I am 80 years old, and I have never seen anything like we have in Donald Trump: an erratic, unstable human being; a person ignorant of our country and the world al large; a man whose mental health is deteriorating in plain view. We have never been more at risk in national security.

The killing of two Minnesota citizens by ICE who were protesting (their civil right) and the cowardly way in which Homeland Security reacted by calling them both insurrectionists is how dictatorships operate. Each family has a right to a full investigation. Life is not cheap in America under normal conditions.

I am begging you and your colleagues to stand up for the Republic! Protect our 250 years of striving together to make the best country we can. My God, the world is turning away from us. But do you know what I hold each of you most responsible for? Breaking the trust of the American people in such ways that you have weakened and endangered us. STAND UP!! Think about your legacy.

Sincerely,

Susan Lee Feathers

Devoted Patriot of American Democracy

Teacher, Writer, Active Citizen