Dear Mr. Trump:

Sorry, but I cannot address you as ‘President Trump.’ Not when I regard you, and every individual who has sworn allegiance to you, as fundamentaliy illegitimate. You are all disqualified for positions of high authority by your rank dishonesty and willingness to sacrifice honor for personal gain. 

Let there be no question about it. You are a national disgrace, and unfit to hold the title and the powers of the highest office in our land. You are as authentic and honest as å $3 bill. 

And like a $3 bill, your value will last only as long as those who have chosen to trade in such currency continue to feast at your table.

Your presidential acts to date carry the stench of self-serving behavior and, if there’s any sense of national interest, your pursuit of it seems mostly delusional. As if you feel the need to prove the depth of your intellect by the amount of confusion it’s able to create. With each of your appointments, especially to positions of power, it becomes more evident that your choices are dictated by the thinnest of logic streams, that obedience to you must be absolute, and that one day when you choose to act against the Constitution for a second time, these fellow travelers would never dare impede your actions.

Running for president to avoid the consequences of your criminal behavior, you made a mockery of our political system. Could you have run out the clock on your federal charges without the assistance of corrupt judges and Republican Party hacks?  Probably not. 

Unlike those corrupt judges, most of us accept the fact you sent a mob to sack the Capitol on January 6 of 2021.Which is why, in our minds at least, you are barred, under the 14^th Amendment, from ever serving in any capacity in our government. No matter if a corrupt Supreme Court tells you otherwise.

SO here I am, a 79 year-old retired writer and ad guy. I’m not the activist to mount the revolution you and your gaggle of sycophants deserve. 

So it must follow that my opposition to your rule will be mostly silent, mostly unfurled in the dark recesses of my mind where you will never receive acknowledgement as my president, nor earn my respect and support. I am not a law-breaker. I will continue to pay my taxes, live a lawful life. But I will never forget. And never give up hope that one day you—and all those who gain their legitimacy by propping you up—will be brought down. 

Your desecration of the Constitution cannot be cancelled out by a single election. Your infamy will be taught in schools for decades to come, your memory a canker on the soul of American democracy. 

No surprise, if one day your face, like that of many American presidents, will be featured on American currency. 

It only took 249 years, but America finally has a president worthy of appearing on a $3 bill.

IT’S RECALLING ALL THE RACES RUN

That makes me frown and often fret.

It’s recalling that my memory’s gone

Left behind with

Races I never ran but still regret.

It’s knowing I once had 

Muscles, wavy hair and unspent power

To fuel my stride.

Now recalled with diminished self-awareness

And forgotten fields of pride.

IT’S LIVING IN A WORLD I NEVER CHOSE

That makes me question

Who I see behind my eyes.

It’s living in a body that 

fails so often

There’s never a sense of real surprise.

It’s feeling shackled and forgotten

In a prison of my Maker’s 

Cruelest device.

A prison whose crumbling walls

Shout whispers of forgotten fields

And my inevitable demise.

IT’S THOSE FORGOTTEN FIELDS

Where lovers no longer lay 

Where youth and plans and dreams

No longer visit or stay to play. 

It’s the power and the fires of my youth

Thoughtlessly squandered and 

Stupidly spent,

The races I now count as lost

Whose victories and echoing cheers 

So quickly came and more quickly went.

These memories undo my peace 

They shake my fragments of grace.

They leave me to ask with grim irony 

Which of all the races yet to run

Will bring me my final race?

Full disclosure, I’ve been a fan of Tina Jackson since first reading her wonderful novel, The Beloved Children. That novel, like this one, brings history to life with characters so real, complex and interesting you find yourself compelled to keep reading to learn their full story. 

Spirit Burns takes a rich and transformative moment in British history told from the point of view of the Suffragettes, an often neglected driving force for change that fueled cultural and class upheaval in early 20th century Britain. The lives of the woman portrayed are offered in relation to the shocking need for women of that period to be released from the bonds, legal and cultural, that kept them subservient and far poorer than their male counterparts in British society. 

Spirit Burns focuses on the lives of three women who represent Britain’s stagnant class structure of the period in question. These women—a mill worker, a stage performer and a young lady of the upper class—all suffer from British society’s endemic lack of opportunity for those of the “fairer sex” to express themselves, manage their affairs and grow as active partners and competitors to the males who dominate and control their lives. Their at-times militant struggle for the vote serves as an apt metaphor for all the power they were consistently denied on a day to day basis. Nothing holds them down more than the lock-tight grip of poverty and reduced opportunity that was the lot of woman up until the 1920’s.

Miss Jackson is as deft with words as she is in building characters and events you can believe in. And most especially skilled, the reader will discover, in allowing language and common parlance to clearly portray distinctions in class and lifestyles.

Spirit Burns is literature at its finest! I recommend it unhesitatingly.

      When I was 6 years old, I broke one of my mother’s favorite teacups. It wasn’t a big break. The main tea chamber remained whole and unbroken, though the cup’s thin curly handle had broken free, so to speak, and refused to ever hold up the cup again. 

Refused, that is, until my mother took the breakaway handle and deftly applied a tear of glue to each of its uneven ends.

Quickly fitting the errant handle back into place, she smiled and said, “There!” with that special smile of hers. 

“No reason to cry,” she added softly, holding up the resurrected cup for my inspection. “Now, dry your tears.”

Which is exactly what I did.

When I was 12 years old, I broke my bicycle, thick fabric from my pants leg accidentally getting chewed up in the bicycle’s chain.

“It wasn’t your fault,” My mom said soothingly to once again quell my tears. 

It took mom two hours with scissors and sewing sheers to free the chewed up corduroy fabric from the jammed bicycle chain. Thus, rescuing both my frazzled emotions and, most happily, my broken bike. 

True to form, Mom smiled softly and told me to dry my tears

In looking back, I see there were two items in my mother’s repair kit she repeatedly applied to whatever broken items she faced in her life. 

Love, of course, was the first of these two essentials. Love sent out in all directions. Not only towards her son whose brokenness was directly tied to the injuries suffered by cup and bike, but also the love in which she held her world and all within it. The same love that made her stand up for those women rejected by others in her retirement community. A love that caused her to be the best Mom she could be, also the best friend and the best human being. Talk to my cousins, Mom was the aunt they remember with the most affection. Same with my friends.

A world filled with my Mother’s love was a world always on the mend.

The second critical ingredient in Mom’s repair kit was time. Time for my Mother’s love to take effect. Time for the glue to harden. Time to snip away and release all the trapped fragments of corduroy. Time for her son’s pain to fall into distant memory, as wounds always will. If you give them enough time.

Today, I search for meaning and direction in the turns my country has recently taken; turns that make no sense to me.  Worse, they frighten me and clearly indicate a tear in the fabric of our wholeness. 

My big question is what can we do to mend the breach? And do it in a way that prevents further damage? 

In simplest terms, we need to heal the wound as we repair the break, just like my Mother once did for me.

For me, the answer lies in doing what I love, which is writing. And while earlier I felt obligated to sound a warning, to write about the coming dangers and tragic consequences we faced if Trump won the election.  

Now I feel compelled to let others fight the fights we clearly see coming, and to consciously bring light, joy and love to anyone who chooses to read what I have to share.

Which brings me back to my Mother, a wonderful human being who made her world a better place, and to offer you her two essential ingredients to help you recover as I will. 

With Love and Time. 

Whatever you do, whether you’re a writer, butcher, waitress, train conductor, chef or teacher, do it with love. And let your love inspire others. You see where this is going? 

Let’s combine our energies to create so much love there won’t be room for anything that makes us sad, lessened, frightened or unhappy.

Yes, I agree. It sounds like a third-grader’s recipe for fixing the world. Brightly colored band-aids of love and good feelings. Pasted everywhere, up and down this crazy country of ours.

And so I dedicate myself through my writing to add smiles, laughs and as much enjoyment as can be crammed into a two or three page blog essay. Like this one.

There! 

Now dry your tears.