To: Susan Brooks, Congresswoman (R, IN)
In this petition I appeal to my representative in Washington, Congresswoman Susan Brooks (R, IN),...
At 81, a refugee from the ruins of Nazi Germany, an immigrant, naturalized US citizen and Marine Corps veteran, long a registered Democrat, I am appalled and deeply troubled by what Fortune magazine has called the "astonishing ability to prevaricate" on the part of the man inaugurated as US President, Donald Trump, who together with his top aides has declared nothing less than war on our media, our free press, and all of us determined to keep an open mind, and to question and defy all that wants to go for truth but is nothing of the sort. As Steve Schmidt, former aide to Senator John McCain, put it, Trump's "cascade of falsehoods" all through the campaign and now in office, is "a direct assault on the very idea of representative democracy." Republicans, democrats, independents and all who are of other persuasions, parties or movements, we must join forces now against the blatant mendacity clamoring and twittering at us in the news from the White House. Is this still the America I came to as a boy soon after the catastrophic end of Hitler's genocidal war, or is it to be George Orwell's 1984?
Why is this important?
If the totalitarian lie were to triumph in America, no one would be safe. But as a refugee, immigrant and naturalized citizen, despite my military service and long years in America, I feel personally under threat. Fighting cancer as I have been for some seven years, for me to join a demonstration and be arrested and charged, as journalists recently were, might well have dire consequences for my otherwise quiet middle-class life with my wife here in Indianapolis.