An open letter on the newest debt ceiling deal.
A letter I sent to my legislators, and to the President. Please feel free to plagiarize, modify, and send it to your own legislators. Only do so quickly. Tomorrow it may be too late.
Dear ------,
I apologize that my letter is so impersonally addressed, however I cannot contain my disappointment at the news I am hearing tonight.
How can it be that we as a nation have sunk so low that we have sent a cohort to Washington D.C. that would choose to balance the nation’s accounts on the backs of children, the elderly, the indigent, and the infirm, for no better reason than to spare the pennies of the wealthiest among us? How can we have elected a cohort that, in the face of the demands of its right-most fringe, have chosen capitulation, complicity, over even the last frayed ends of principle?
What you, Democrats and Republicans, are being asked to vote for in this deficit deal is morally reprehensible, needlessly cruel, and makes a mockery of exactly the Christian values that so many of you espouse in your election-year rhetoric. And what is worse, you have traded your consciences for a pittance, for a deal that does little more than kick the can down the road, as Speaker Boehner is so fond of putting it.
By failing to raise the debt limit in a fashion that will last more than just a few months, you abdicate your responsibilities as stewards of the nation. By installing unreasonable power in intercameral super-committees, you abdicate your responsibilities as legislators beholden to your constituents. And by agreeing to a deficit-reduction plan that is so uncharitable, especially in this time of rampant unemployment, you abdicate your responsibilities as human beings.
I want to see the debt ceiling raised. I find the prospect of a Federal default viscerally chilling. But you, Democrats and Republicans, can do better than this. Look at unemployment, and do better. Look at health-care and education inequality, and do better. Look at our sick, our poor, our old, and our young, and please do better.
Sincerely,
-------- ---------.
Dear ------,
I apologize that my letter is so impersonally addressed, however I cannot contain my disappointment at the news I am hearing tonight.
How can it be that we as a nation have sunk so low that we have sent a cohort to Washington D.C. that would choose to balance the nation’s accounts on the backs of children, the elderly, the indigent, and the infirm, for no better reason than to spare the pennies of the wealthiest among us? How can we have elected a cohort that, in the face of the demands of its right-most fringe, have chosen capitulation, complicity, over even the last frayed ends of principle?
What you, Democrats and Republicans, are being asked to vote for in this deficit deal is morally reprehensible, needlessly cruel, and makes a mockery of exactly the Christian values that so many of you espouse in your election-year rhetoric. And what is worse, you have traded your consciences for a pittance, for a deal that does little more than kick the can down the road, as Speaker Boehner is so fond of putting it.
By failing to raise the debt limit in a fashion that will last more than just a few months, you abdicate your responsibilities as stewards of the nation. By installing unreasonable power in intercameral super-committees, you abdicate your responsibilities as legislators beholden to your constituents. And by agreeing to a deficit-reduction plan that is so uncharitable, especially in this time of rampant unemployment, you abdicate your responsibilities as human beings.
I want to see the debt ceiling raised. I find the prospect of a Federal default viscerally chilling. But you, Democrats and Republicans, can do better than this. Look at unemployment, and do better. Look at health-care and education inequality, and do better. Look at our sick, our poor, our old, and our young, and please do better.
Sincerely,
-------- ---------.