True Heroes

Dear Mr. President,

Sometimes I feel like a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Or maybe Cassandra that no one wants to hear. I write these letters, I send them both by USPS (save the USPS!) and the White House web site to up the odds that somebody might read one, but no response. I post them on my blog. Very few readers, no comments. A month or so ago I got a hit from Malaysia. Cool! My first foreign country. Maybe your half-sister? Or maybe the CIA? Then a few weeks ago I started getting hits from other countries: Germany, Romania, Brazil, S. Korea… and last week Russia. Russia! How’d they find me? The next day the Russians were back, and the day after that and the day after that. Then came China. More foreigners now read my letters online than Americans. At first I was pleased and curious. Who are these people? Then I got a little anxious, even paranoid. Are they CIA? KGB? NSA? Maybe the FBI is compiling a dossier on me. Maybe I’ll get a knock on my door in the middle of the night. Maybe I’m moving up on the list of “nominees” for your Kill List. Who knows what’s going on any more, what with all the secrecy and attempts to silence dissent. After watching you for the past 3½ years, watching you gut the Constitution, violate domestic and international law, ignore every campaign pledge you made in 2008 and then learn you personally approve every name put on your weekly Kill List, I‘m entitled to be paranoid. I think you’re capable of almost any evil. So when the Russians started showing up every day I wondered who they were, but as a friend points out, there’s a lot of dissent in Russia right now, resistance against Putin’s rigged election, against the repressive laws he’s putting in place, and maybe the people reading my letters are dissidents wanting to know how Americans view their government, maybe gaining encouragement in the knowledge that others are resisting repression and injustice. I’ve embraced that view. I’d rather believe that’s the case than that they’re secret agents gathering evidence against me. And I’m cheering them on, drawing encouragement from them as well. Resistance to oppression and injustice anywhere is resistance to oppression and injustice everywhere. Democracy and freedom requires constant struggle and is easily lost. Unlike you, Mr. President, I believe it takes more courage to put down arms and resist than to take up arms and fight. I believe the true heroes are not the armed warriors but those who peacefully resist injustice.