Dear America

According to recent polls, some 47 percent of you are propping up a president who a few days ago declared himself a nationalist from a podium, over a loudspeaker, as some of you cheered, as if it was code to unleash the forces of hate to wage war.

You are giving credence and power to a man who declares the free press the enemy of the people, and a cadre of Republican minions too cowardly or morally bankrupt to stand against him, who in fact run all manner of racist and spectacularly dishonest ad campaigns in political races, who steal millions of votes in plain sight, whose nationalist rhetoric inflames the forces of hate to wage war.

This morning, the war was joined by those forces responding to the dog whistle, which was really a bullhorn. They sent pipe bombs to those who would seek to check their rampant, violent brand of nationalism. America, your president is stoking the flames of a race war, one in which white supremacists devote themselves to the destruction and nullification of all others. You might think I'm overstating things, that I too am being inflammatory, but I'm really not.

Today, several explosive devices were intercepted, one at the home of the Clintons, one at the home of the Obamas, one sent to CNN at the Time Warner building in midtown Manhattan. Also targeted by these letter bombs were former attorney general Eric Holder, ex CIA man and Trump critic John Brennan, congresswomen Maxine Waters and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and liberal billionaire George Soros.

This is America in 2018. We are no longer on the brink, but deep in the maw of a new civil war. The weapons have changed, and so have the battlegrounds. But the forces of division, bigotry, and hate look much the same. So when the activists and community organizers plead with us to get out there and vote as if our life depends on it, they are not speaking in euphemism.

Our very lives depend on what we do now.