A LETTER TO DONALD TRUMP’S SUPPORTERS
©Wendell Griffen, 2024
June 7, 2024
Little Rock, Arkansas
Dear
Neighbors,
I write you in the aftermath of the May 30 New York state court jury verdict that found Donald Trump guilty of committing 34 felony offenses of falsifying business records in order to conceal a conspiracy to interfere with the 2020 U.S. presidential election. I write as a fellow citizen of the United States, native of the American South, African American pastor in the religion of Jesus, honorably discharged former U.S. Army officer, retired state court trial and appellate judge, husband, father, and grandfather.
Above all, I am your neighbor.
We hold differing views about the role of government. However, I hope we agree that falsifying business records is wrong.
I hope we agree that people should not lie, cheat, or entice others to do so.
I doubt that you routinely entrust your personal affairs to people who lie, cheat, and steal.
I doubt that you encourage your children to cheat in sports, on their schoolwork, or in other endeavors.
I suspect that you do not view people who lie, cheat, and steal to be honorable, decent, or commendable.
You do not trust people who habitually lie, cheat, and steal to care for your children, service your automobiles, or manage your finances.
Many of you profess to hold religious beliefs.
Yet, you are Donald Trump’s most determined followers.
Perhaps you embrace Trump’s values and consider them necessary for national leadership. Perhaps you disapprove of Trump’s values, but consider his celebrity and character necessary for achieving your social, political, and cultural goals. I do not know.
However, you and I know that a guilty verdict means that a person is not innocent of a criminal charge, as a matter of law.
A jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony charges. He is now a convicted felon, regardless of what we think about his political values and views.
A convicted felon is legally disqualified from serving in the U.S. military.
A convicted felon is legally disqualified from working for the U.S. Postal Service.
A convicted felon is legally disqualified from being hired as a public-school teacher.
A convicted felon is legally disqualified from receiving a student loan.
Convicted felons are not allowed to enter Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Cuba, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Macau, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and United States.
If Donald Trump were an immigrant, he would be legally barred from entering the United States.
He would be legally barred from becoming a citizen, voting, and owning a firearm in the United States.
Yet, you are determined to elect Donald Trump President of the United States.
You are unwilling to accept convicted felons as voters, but are determined to entrust a convicted felon with the power to preside over the nation.
You are unwilling to allow convicted felons to live in public housing (other than jails and prisons), or even in private housing on your street. However, you are willing to have him live in the White House.
You refuse to license convicted felons to work in many professions of trust, but insist that Trump is trustworthy despite having been convicted of 34 instances of falsifying business records for the purpose of influencing an election.
You refuse to license convicted felons to own a rifle, shotgun, or handgun. Yet you are willing to entrust Donald Trump with authority to command the entire U.S. military arsenal, including nuclear weapons.
You believe that naked, authoritarian, deceitful, cruel, and cold-blooded power wielded by a wealthy white convicted felon poses no threat to national security, unity, justice, and global peace. Your sense of right and wrong begins and ends in ruthless devotion to white supremacy, and especially white male supremacy.
I have never held that belief. I will never share that belief.
The nation and world deserve better than that.
Above all, God deserves better than that.
Sincerely,
Wendell
Griffen
Your
Neighbor
Perfect! And I wholeheartedly agree. Thank you for rising up and giving us an example of integrity and morality.
ReplyDeleteA worthy read for those who are Advocates for Democracy.
ReplyDeleteAs I read Griffen's piece, I was put in mind of Reverend Vernon Johns, who preceded MLK in shattering the notion that church leaders were bound to limit their concern for the people to the confines of the church walls and religious creeds. Up to Johns' time, too many southern Black pastors were used as inadvertent instruments of Weaponized White Religion to keep freed slaves' focus on the hereafter instead of on their abuses by White Supremacists on this earthly plane. Griffen's letter also brought to mind MLK's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." In addition to newspapers, Reverend Griffen's letter should be sent to every Black Church in the country, as well.
“Each time one stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others,
or strikes out against injustice, he/she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.”
Robert F Kennedy (Sr.)
The evidence is absolutely clear that the Radical Right Extremists who are driving the GOP (RRE/GOP) attach their FIRST LOVE, THEIR HIGHEST LOYALTY, to the people who declared war on America on April 12, 1861 and January 6, 2021.
Alexander Hamilton Stephens, sole vice president of the Confederacy, dispensed with any pretense about why the Southern states were breaking away from the union. He explicitly rejected the claim in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. In an infamous speech, called the Cornerstone Speech, he said:
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
What made the speech so diabolical was its heavy use of Biblical scripture to justify the torture, rape and enslavement of other human beings.