If you believe in freedom. If you want to believe in the United States of America. And if you are disturbed about the course it is taking, do not choose to be silent, and in despair and loathing of those Republican leaders who violate our freedoms and mock those who criticize and oppose them.

As an inspiration, read stories about real American heroes, those who do not give up on a country because it has betrayed them. And consider that people and democracies falter in their duties and inattentions, for numbers of reasons. We have recovered from such miscues and inattentions in the past.

Read about the incarceration of innocent Japanese Americans after Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor (“The last witnesses …,” LA Times 3/27/2023). Consider that a president of the United States, FDR, a man revered in history, actually signed an order to inter these innocent people — men, women, and children — simply because they were Japanese. Read about Ted’s letters, and his service as a soldier defending our country.

An article in the Los Angeles Times seems appropriate due to the location it memorializes, Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, California, and its horse stalls, unclean and smelly. If you are Christian, perhaps it mocks a basic story you learned as a child, Christ, born in a manger, his birth hidden due to threats of a Roman ruler. Only this story is about whole Japanese families imprisoned in horse stalls, treated like slaves, their property and their lives taken away.

We keep electing presidents with a minority of the popular vote. One, in 2000, was, in effect, chosen by the Supreme Court, and went on later to start a bogus war built on bold lies. Though that war was responsible for 100s of thousands of innocent deaths and destruction, in the short-run, history has forgiven him.

If you think this cannot happen to you because you are a white American who shares their innocence. Think again. And look at current news stories. In the last election, we had 74 million American voters voting for a career criminal, a con man, a sex abuser, a misogynist, a racist, and betrayer of our country, who still publicly scoffs as his detractors, and is a rude supporter and advocate of all present-day tyrants. And this American betrayer and seditionist, is actually running for president.

We now have a Florida governor who bans books, takes over colleges, uses his power as governor to vanquish his opponents, imprisons voters who vote against him, and kidnaps and, for political reasons, sends away those seeking freedom in our country. We have a whole political party supporting seditionists, actively or in silence.

81 million voted for Joe Biden as president in 2020. A traitorous, now, ex-president, Trump, had used his powers of office to incite violent takeover of our government. A majority of one political party supported the coup and still do. You thought the era of shame and betrayal was behind us? Think again. Seditious media empires – Fox Spews, Breitbart, & Newsmax, for example — did not crumble just because we had an unsuccessful coup and a political party still support it.

In March of 2023, A few scurrilous leaders of this seditionist party proved it by gathering in a shabby group to cheer the imprisoned Trump seditionists who tried to topple our government (Our cheer: They do not back the red, white & blue; they back the coup.). Is not that a bitter irony when few Americans protested the imprisonment of true American patriot families in December of 1941.

And we, the majority, have been so outraged each day by acts of betrayal by perps of one party and by supporting white-nationalist media figures, that our outrage is spent and now normalized.

How do we recover from this?