Friends,
Over the past several weeks, Trump and his MAGA stooges in Congress have passed legislation to strip health care from 10 million people; cut food stamp benefits for 40 million Americans, half of them children; slash $8 billion from lifesaving foreign aid programs; defund public radio and television stations nationwide; kill hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs; and hand $4.5 trillion in tax breaks to Trump and his billionaire friends. And that’s not nearly all of the damage.
How do we respond to this catastrophe?
I think of Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, whom I met in 2003, in Prague. What struck me about him was a warmth and optimism that radiated outward. When we walked into a small restaurant, all the diners stood and applauded, and sang.
Havel had become politically active as poet, playwright, and dissident after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — which put him under the surveillance of the secret police. He was repeatedly jailed, the longest from 1979 to 1983. (In 1989, his Civic Forum party played a major part in the Velvet Revolution that ended Soviet dominance, and he was elected president shortly thereafter.)
No comments:
Post a Comment