By Larry Winters, New Paltz

After Election Day November 2020

Letter to the Editor

Posted 11/12/20

In upstate New York the weather is gray, even the few remaining yellow leaves, look dull. It’s a time to reflect even though, it feels like I am being forced by voting and the pandemic, to open …

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By Larry Winters, New Paltz

After Election Day November 2020

Letter to the Editor

Posted

In upstate New York the weather is gray, even the few remaining yellow leaves, look dull. It’s a time to reflect even though, it feels like I am being forced by voting and the pandemic, to open the cover of a book I don’t want to read. I will have something to say to those who have read every word.

These past four years have taken me beyond boundaries I thought I had built inside myself to keep out the foolishness in the political and public worlds. I thought I knew better than to allow what I saw as immature, and psychologically impaired behaviors of our POTUS, supported and used and manipulated by the elected leadership surrounding him.

That world had no place inside my life, was the statement I silently made. Wrong, it insidiously seeped into the cracks, wiggled its way into my unconscious, and fed upon my anger, forcing open, places inside that I thought I had welded shut years ago after the Vietnam war.

The young patriot that joined the Marines in 1967, I buried in the morass of corrupted government that used my life to elect politicians supported by wealthy corporations. I never expected those welds to be opened by the emotions stirred by a draft dodging, sex addicted, buffoon who was bullying the “adolescent boy” personalities surrounding him.

What seemed to awaken me was when my wife and I were in Kingston a few days ago and suddenly the traffic on Albany Avenue Extension stopped. As we waited in the right hand lane, trucks with Trump flags began passing us on the left blowing their horns. My wife said that she felt frightened. I was angry that these almost all men in pickup trucks were bogarting their way past us. I wondered how many of these men behaving like militia, had spent time on a battlefield, defending the freedoms they enjoyed, as they pushed their point of view on the cars they’d stopped. I saw them as pick up truck bullies being led by their draft dodging General. How would the millions of dead and living veterans who’d given them this freedom, feel about this display? I felt it was intimidation to support a leader who had no. understanding of the life offerings that had gone into making America. 

In Vietnam I sacrificed my freedom and future for poor decisions made by politicians, but I believed at the time I was protecting the ideals and moral values of my country. As of late I feel those capstones of America have been buried under so many lies, digging them out will take tons of BS loaded into the back of a lot of pick up trucks before we are able to recognize we stand on the shoulders of those before us. I  have not seen the Trump flag having any  relationship to the American flag.

To place your life on the line for a Trump flag would be like trusting Putin to count the votes in this election.