Dear People of France,
Please.
Don’t. Do. It. Don’t even think about it. Yeah, I know, sometimes it’s just like the movies. That brash talking, flashy bad boy is just so sexy, so appealing, so different that you can’t help but believe every word he says, and follow him on to his version of greatness. It’s not until you find yourself boarded up in the house, with guns in everybody’s hands, and police bullhorns blasting out orders and threats that you finally understand what his end game was. Total destruction.
Believe me, we know. Because we’ve been there and done that, and look at where we are now. 16 months ago what we have here today was all just a joke, although be it a joke in poor taste. Some nativist, populist, bomb throwing clown, spouting a line that could never appeal to the majority. He wasn’t just ignored by the majority, hell, you can’t ignore a 10 car crash, but, much more dangerously, he was dismissed. This is the cardinal sin in politics, dismissing a winner.
Here my French friends is what we Americans have learned at a bitter price, it is actually two lessons. First, losers and jokes don’t make it to the general election. No matter how clownish and out of the mainstream they sound, no matter what outlandish things they say, they did not get to the general election by accident, it was not a fluke, they got more votes than anybody else on that side. Second, get over the tired old saw that all politicians lie. That may be true for most “normal” politicians who pander to popular opinions and feelings to get votes, but when you hear a politician spouting off the wall, divisive, societal destructive rhetoric, believe them. They are not a normal politician, and they are not speaking to appeal to the mainstream, they are speaking to a very specific portion of the electorate, and they are deadly serious.
We live in scary and dangerous times. People are dissatisfied with their leaders and the forms their governments have taken. But in our country, while a core “base” voted to support the actual policies and rhetoric that Donald Trump was spewing out, the people who put him over the top were not core supporters. They were angry, disillusioned people, they felt marginalized and left out, unhappy with the direction the government was taking, and wanted a change. Change can come in many forms, and not all of them are constructive and to the good. Pray that you have learned that from our experience.
A government is not built overnight, it is a house, and it is built one principle at a time, block by block, and takes years, if not decades for each room to be completed. Is it perfect? Of course it’s not, it’s built by fallible humans, with their own ideas and ideals, but normally it is built with the goal of the common good for all of its citizens. Certainly there are always things that need to be changed, but the change needs to be organized and geared to the root of the problem. If your kitchen sink leaks, or there are cracks in a bedroom wall, do you demolish the entire house to repair those problems? Beware, for that is exactly the solution that some are now telling you must be undertaken.
Seventy five years ago, your great grandparents, their friends and neighbors, and all of their fellow citizens were forced to live under under the rule of a literal Fascist dictator, and found out that life in the Peoples Paradise was not all it was cracked up to be for those that were not the “chosen” people. If you were not with them, then you were against them, and let it be on your head. The biggest differences between then and now is that now nobody is brandishing guns (yet), and then, your great grandparents had no choice, today it rests squarely in the hands of each and every one of you.
You have two weeks to make up your mind. I hope that you use that time for calm reflection, of who and what you are, and take wisdom and counsel from your better angels. We here in America would gladly see you spared the desperation and fury of the resistance we have had to mount, and will need to continue to maintain to wrest back control of the country we love from a form of rule that is contrary to everything we stand for and hold dear. But we have no choice but resistance, the other outcome would be intolerable. The choice is yours. Please choose wisely.
Sincerely,
Murf