Charles Auld, a lifelong Republican from Alabama who became a Dean Democrat during Bush's tenure, is leaving. The following is a message he posted to his large mailing list.
On September 24, the day that thousands of patriotic Americans traveled to our nation's capital to protest an immoral war that is being waged in our names, I also boarded a plane; but bound for another country. I left the United States of America that Saturday, and my family and I now reside in Canada. I obtained a Canadian work permit at the port of entry (Toronto) and I stared a new job with a large insurance provider in the province of New Brunswick. I phoned my former supervisor yesterday to let him know I'm not returning to that job, and only to the States to oversee the sale of our property there, and the movement of our household goods and animals to our new home.
Why did I choose to do this? At one time, I might have considered anger the primary motivator; but not now. Most of the anger I've felt in the past has turned to disappointment. I'm terribly disappointed in the people I once respected and often admired back in the States. In the past few years, I've grown to see them as small-minded, parochial, shallow, consummately selfish, and lacking both courage and conviction ... and not people I choose to be identified with.
If you are reading this; you are certainly not one of those people. You are only receiving this now because you have been faithful to true American values from the beginning; you are a person of honor who refused to abandon those principles, even when it became unpopular to stand by them. You refused to accept the notion that disagreement with our leadership is traitorous. Most of you came to know me through the failed campaign of Howard Dean to win the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. That campaign was a noble endeavor.
Your steadfastness will be rewarded. I really believe that. We've all sown seeds that are beginning to germinate, take root, and flourish. Remember the saying that "no single raindrop ever considered itself responsible for the flood" ?
I'll be closing down this mailing list one day soon, I'm not sure how long ago I started this, but I think it was before I read the speech I excerpt below from William Rivers Pitt. I believe this is one of the most inspiring things I ever sent to the list, and I didn't write it. I wish I had, because it expresses the entire spirit which motivated me to do things (only within the past couple of years) that I never even considered doing before. The entire speech is worth re-reading:
At bottom, America is a dream, an idea. You can take away all our roads, our crops, our people, our cities, our armies -- you can take all of that away, and the idea will still be there as pure and great as anything conceived by the human mind. I do very much believe that the idea that is America stands as the last, best hope for this world. When used properly, it can work wonders.
That idea, that dream, is in mortal peril. You can still have all our roads, our crops, our people, our cities, our armies -- you can have all of that, but if you murder the idea that is America, you have murdered America itself in a way that ten thousand 9/11s could never do. The men and women within this current administration are murdering the idea that is America with their Patriot Acts, their destruction of civil liberties, their lies, their daily undermining of even the most basic tenets of decency and freedom and justice that we have tried to live up to for 227 years.
William Rivers Pitt, a New York Times best-selling author of two books, War On Iraq (Context Books) and The Greatest Sedition is Silence (Pluto Press), in an address delivered August 10, 2003, to the Veterans for Peace National Convention in San Francisco
I love you all. Thanks for being my sounding board and for letting me know I've never been truly alone!
Charles
By the way; I don't want my last message to be taken as disparaging of Americans in general (though I doubt it was taken that way). What I meant was simply this: that nothing our government has done under the Bush administration has dismayed me ... TERRIFIED me ... as much as the response of the American people to those actions. Even the horrendous attacks on the WTC towers in NYC didn't frighten me as much as the response of my neighbors, co-workers, friends and (in some cases) my family.
People, if our value systems change at the whim of malevolent manipulators, they aren't truly values at all. If we have to be told how to act, think and feel; then we have already chosen tyranny.
I think the response to the Katrina disaster has been most encouraging, though ... it's as though people awakened to the reality that they might truly be next. In other words, we're all losing our "safety nets" to encroaching corporatism.
Charles
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