A Thank You Letter to Donald J. Trump...

 

Hey, Donald –

Yeah, I get it: kind of a disrespectful way to address a prez but it seemed appropriate given everything. Frankly, you seem to be someone who likes to let people know what you think and have no qualms about cutting to the chase, so I will do the same: the purpose of this letter is to state the obvious (you’re a dick), but also let you know that I have come to be grateful for your shockingly horrid ways. Not in the hippie-yogic spreading love-and-light kind of way – that ain’t me – but that I am grateful precisely for your dirt-bagginess and I am happy to tell you why.

I’ll start by acknowledging that I am not exactly breaking new territory by pointing this out but, yeah, you’re disgusting in every conceivable way and even perhaps some inconceivable ways. Nuns don’t like you, conservatives don’t like you, and this hilarious guy really hates you. Ted Nugent, however, is a big ol’ presumably malodorous fanboy, which says something about your standing with the Duck Dynasty crowd, I guess. So I stand with those with a heart and a brain who know that you are a disaster but, still, I want to thank you for your glaringly horrible ways.

Stay with me here for a minute. To say what I want to say, I need to give you a bit of my background. I know that hearing someone else talk about something not relating directly to you must take the utmost of impulse control for you to sit through but I will try to make it quick. I’m doing this for the others who may read this letter. Maybe you can nod off for a bit or find someone to rage at on Twitter or maybe let Spicer loofah your feet in the White House steam room and I’ll just let you know when you need to pay attention again, ‘kay? ‘Kay.

A bit of a history…

I was one of those kids who never really understood meanness, which is not to say that I was ever perfect by a long shot, but I was that kid who was rescuing bugs from the bullies down the block who wanted to squish them, that kid who thought racism was, frankly, cruel and stupid, that kid who was devastated when the ERA didn’t get ratified. I wasn’t an activist until college but as someone who went through a pretty terrible stage of being picked on from grades fifth through eighth, I had a strong disdain for injustice that was built into my bedrock from a young age.

My freshman year of college, I signed up for about a dozen activist groups (including the Creative Anachronists, misreading their signup sheet as Creative Anarchists and I was very confused when I was ceremoniously bowed to and addressed as “m’lady” at my first meeting); I spent the night, or maybe just a couple of hours, at a student-built shantytown to raise awareness of the apartheid system in South Africa; I jammed onto a stuffy and cramped bus, rode from Kansas to Washington D.C. to protest U.S. involvement in Nicaragua, protested and then ate fried rice seated on the floor of a packed Chinese restaurant with my friends before we had to rush off to take the long bus ride back to Kansas; spent my weekends with my radical feminist friends where we made protest signs together, which was when I first got a real taste for activism.

After college, I remained an activist but became much less interested in politics. To be honest, my activism was never really about that anyway. Being a creative type, politics is not my jam. At all. I find it boring, tedious and spilling over with of the kind of people I don’t like to give much real estate to in my thoughts. I briefly dabbled in socialism for a year or so after college but found the cold church basement meetings, endless arguments over minutia and the aggressively drab wardrobe (yes, I was shallow) to be as or more off-putting than mainstream politics. So I drifted out.

This is not to say that I stopped being an activist. I didn’t. Look at the name of this blog, yo. But you, Donald, and your wretched Donaldness have forced me to drift back into the realm of politics again. And I think I am here to stay now not because I am suddenly interested in politics but because I don't think citizens who care have the luxury of that choice anymore. Our nation’s future is at stake if we don’t start seriously investing in fixing what is so wrong about this country.

Oh, yeah, you should probably start paying attention now.

So, Donald, these are some of the things I’ve done in the last month or two I hadn’t done in years previous:

• Added my Members of Congress contacts – including all their offices – into my phone. Pointer: don’t try calling Dick Durbin’s DC office. You will never get through. You will best reach someone at a local office.

• Added Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan into my phone as well. Yeah, it was revolting and I feel like I need to have a smudge ceremony for my poor phone now. I added Nancy Pelosi, too, and the Congressional switchboard. (This, by the way, is likely the only way to get through to Paul Ryan: 202-224-3121.)

• I’ve called my Members of Congress so often, I am recognizing voices and at least one (Team Duckworth’s DC office!) knows me by name now, too. We exchange pleasantries every Monday when he answers.

• I do actions items listed at the following every week: The 65, Wall-of-Us, 5Calls, and all the various email alerts I get on the regular.  

• I started a local chapter of Indivisible. We have met once, we meet again Saturday to write postcards to our members of Congress and have our second general meeting next week. (If you live in my area and you want in, message me!)

• I have brainstormed protest sign ideas with my son and protested.


 

• I attended the Women’s March with my family and friends and, oh, 250,000 others.

• I’ve been pestering my Representative about when his next Town Hall meeting is, which sounds about as enticing and exciting as a Socialist church basement meeting but I am actually looking forward to it. This kind of frightens me as much as anything but whatever.

I am not saying this to say that I'm special or anything. I am just one of millions who is so appalled by you and what your administration represents that I am fully over my aversion to politics and am back in the game.

I am not the only one. I have heard story after story of people who were not activists until you, Donald. In my Indivisible chapter, neophyte activists outnumber those of us who have been at protests before. People who have never been to a protest until recently are giving up their weekends, sitting on hold with their members of Congress, learning new skills, familiarizing themselves with how the system works because and they are excited to do so because that is how much your hateful ways have motivated citizens. You are a crash course on civic engagement, and not just for lefty firebrands like me, but the for grandparents, centrists, children, and so on, who are all united against you.  

You have no idea what you did just by being horrible, Donald. Go you, I guess!

You did what no one else has been able to do: you woke up the masses. It turns out you were just what we needed – vile, despicable and repugnant in every way – to see that our country and basic decency were at stake and that we really valued it. Your racist, misogynist, xenophobic, treasonous, autocratic ways were the fire we needed lit under us and now you have awakened a sleeping giant.

So thank you, Donald. You are every bit as disgusting as we needed you to be. I'm hoping in the future, things won't need to be this dire for us to give a damn, but it is what it is.

And now we will defeat you.

Yours truly -

Marla Rose