Fight for your rights – or lose them!

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms – lost to Americans?

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms – lost to Americans?

Mr. Donald Trump is hell bent on resisting individual rights and freedoms.

Mr. Trump would isolate us from the world with a wall.

Mr. Trump leans on local police forces to extend federal police powers into our local communities on the claimed need to rid the nation of immigrants.

Mr. Trump suffers from a too sensitive egg-shell-thin temperament and an itchy finger for tweet lies and a growing urge to war clumsily and unconstitutionally in the mid-East.

Regrettably, we have a government of plutocrats and warmongers who pretend empathy but prefer misery.

It’s quite a dystopic picture but to many overseas and here, this is America.

No longer is our nation perceived as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

On January 8, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt praised how our citizens had “forgotten points of the compass.”

Mr. Trump insists our citizens are not all equal and thus does he divide the nation.

President Roosevelt said this nation was bound to resist “any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall.”

Mr. Trump is obsessively bound to build a multi-billion dollar wall to lock in our southern border and keep “those people” out from the south and across the Atlantic.

President Roosevelt condemned “one-way international law.”  Mr. Trump, on the other hand just committed an act of war in Syria in defiance of UN protocols, State Department utterances, and absent any congressional declaration of war.  China charges Mr. Trump did this because his popularity is falling like a stone and he wants to prove he’s independent of Russia.

President Roosevelt insisted our armed forces drew their strength from the “unshakeable belief in the manner of life which they are defending.”  Mr. Trump has relentlessly run down this nation’s finest qualities and persists since his election in compromising and destroying what many at home and abroad believed was best about our nation.

Mr. Trump has contravened President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms:

First, freedom of speech.  Mr. Trump shouts down his opponents, diverts public attention from his misconduct with lies and half truths, and slanders the press – calling journalists the “enemies of the people.”

Second, freedom of worship.  Mr. Trump demonizes and slanders all Muslims as terrorists.

Third, freedom from want.  Mr. Trump cares not at all to help those who are in need.  Not even meals on wheels for the elderly.  His proposed draconian budget confirms this.

Fourth, freedom from fear.  Mr. Trump instills fear, manipulates others using fear and bullying – and is shameless in his cruelty and abuse of individual dignity.

Former NY Governor Mario Cuomo once said that the nation “should not settle for taking care of the strong and hope that economic ambition and charity will do the rest.”  In the Trump Administration, the poor and middle class are on their own.

President Roosevelt argued for “the ending of special privilege for the few” and we have instead installed a nepotic band of privilege in the West Wing and a coterie of the wealthiest in the “people’s government.”

Millions now have health care who didn’t – thanks to the Obama Administration.  Mr. Trump and the Republican leadership promised to replace or amend Obamacare but they couldn’t agree with what or how.

President Roosevelt said our goal is “the preservation of civil liberties for all.”

Mr. Trump is infamous for his public abuse of women and most anyone who disagrees with him.

Mr. Trump insisted that the U.S. Senate destroy what comity remained, brushing aside the rules of the Senate, so that Mr. Trump could elevate a judge to the U.S. Supreme Court who decries many liberties found and illuminated by past high court decisions.

We must re-dedicate ourselves to educating our young, and in public schools, and rid our schools of the superstition and nonsense that defies science and intelligence.  We must not allow charter schools to rob the taxpayer dollars that we need for the public schools.  Yet, Mr. Trump’s choice for Education Secretary favors charter schools over public schools.

We must protect our seniors who rightly live in terror that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are at risk from this Administration and Congress.  Mr. Trump and the Congress constantly threaten to limit or alter this or that aspect of these critical programs.

We must be stewards of the earth, water, and air, necessary to sustain life.  President Roosevelt argued that, as a people, we must enjoy “the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.”  But we have Mr. Trump who knows little of the science of global warming, telling the nation that coal mines and jobs are coming back, defying the trends toward renewables, that, if unchanged, almost certainly assures a shrinking standard of living.

We the people must protect our rights and freedoms by resisting, protesting, attending and speaking at hearings, and, first chance we get, this year and next, voting against those unworthy many who seek to destroy what we patriots are bound to preserve and protect.