Midcoast Peace & Justice Group
committed to positive change through non-violent action
Open Letter to President Obama Alan Hynd's Drawings
Dear Mr. President,
Having voted for you in the 2008 elections with hope in my heart and admiration for your unusual ability to express yourself clearly and honestly, I feel impelled to share with you my thoughts regarding your attempt to bring about ‘change’ which you touted so fervently all through your campaign for the presidency. And I thoroughly expected, perhaps naively, that you would be able to steer our nation out of the moral and economic morass and this culture of militaristic madness into which it had sunk.
These two years since you took office have convinced me that our democracy is fast ebbing away and a militarized conception of statecraft, to which you and V.P. Biden and Secretary of State Clinton have become thralls, is undermining it.
Please follow me through an enumeration of developments which I find devastating and utterly defeating, to a high concept of democracy:
- Targeted assassinations
- The Bush-Cheney counter-insurgency doctrine, which you kept in place, effectively legitimizing open-ended perpetual warfare.
- Your drone attacks, creating terror and slaughtering the innocents, I find the most shattering to my confidence in your moral judgment.
- Your standing by giving tacit approval to renegade banks and their reckless foreclosures, as you back away from your toothless assertions about a moratorium on foreclosures.
- Your standing silently by giving tacit approval to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine, I find appalling and so does the rest of the world.
Those in positions of temporal power as heads of state of the most powerful nations are frequently mesmerized by the belief that the only permissible response to violence is more violence, iterated by them and acted upon with an ill-considered sureness verging on arrogance. This doctrine reiterated by all those in high places, the Pentagon and Congress included, seems to be one of the Washington rules which are propelling the United States toward insolvency, perpetual war and eventual self-destruction.
I feel let down, disappointed and totally dismayed at your lack of vision. I expected so much more of you.
Alan Hynd
Cushing Maine
207 354-6632
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