What My Parents Taught Me

Dear Dad, or Mom, or other parent figures in my life:

I have seen some of you post on Facebook over the past couple weeks, where you've said that voting for Trump is "the right thing to do.".  It has really bothered me and I’ve been thinking about it for several days so I could better articulate why. I have friends of all political stripes and I think I am able to get along with them all fairly well, most of the time :). But with your comments, the strongest emotion I felt was betrayal.

Just fyi: I know that you care deeply about our country and want the best for it. And I have read and reread this post, not wanting it to be offensive or hurtful, so I hope it comes across that way.

I was raised under your guys’ tutelage. I know you tried to teach me many things. A sampling of what I took from it:

• America is a land of freedom and opportunity. You can do anything if you work hard.
• It is worth standing up for what is right, even if you stand alone.
• Don’t bully others, and help those that need assistance.
• Everybody deserves dignity and respect, even if you don’t agree with them.

For much of my life, many of your generation have railed against Democrats in general and the Clintons in particular. The Clintons deserved a good amount of the criticism they’ve received; sex scandals, lost emails, general corruption, etc. I never shared the same contempt for them that you had, but I could understand where you were coming from – the Clintons made a mockery of our expectations, values, and laws, and it was easy to feel angry about that. The Republicans generally put forward presidential candidates that didn’t have the same glaring scandals as the Clintons.

…And then came along Donald Trump. The primaries happened and the Trump Train got rolling.

He said, “let’s ban Muslims from entering the US and monitor their mosques.” My initial thought was, my parents taught me that it’s not right to discriminate based on religion; that’s one of America’s strengths. And I spoke up. But you guys were silent.

Then he said, “we will defy the Geneva conventions and torture our enemies and their families.” And I spoke up, but you guys were still silent.

Then his video was released about him groping other women. And all I heard was, “Bill was bad too.”

I’m not going to go through a full laundry list of the illegal/unconstitutional/ugly things he has said. He has said them, multiple times, on video, and we can find them pretty easily. Trump has never walked back any of those policies or statements to any significant degree. Those positions explain why a raft of Republicans have refused to support him.

But it was the insistence that voting Trump was the "right" thing to do that really got me.

For the last 20 years, I’ve listened to you guys criticize the Clintons. That they have attacked our religious freedoms, that they are corrupt and immoral. That those fatal shortcomings disqualified them from office. And now that Trump is the Republican nominee, you are supporting him through some very similar flaws.

Can you not see the disparity between your words then and actions now?

When, in the history of the world, did electing an extremely flawed person for a couple political favors ever work out well for a country? Doesn’t leadership need to come from the top down?

Are you really that certain that Trump is going to follow through on his promises? You’ve seen how many times he’s shifted his other policies, right?

*******

I get that you don’t want Hillary to win. That’s fine. But let me put this to you in a different way.

I saw Evan McMullin for the first time a couple days ago in Boise. He is the most decent of conservatives’ options. (He’s…actually a conservative, and has been reliably so his whole life.)  He is EASILY more principled than Trump.  (I think my dirty socks may have more principle than Trump does.)

At what point do you stand up for principled leadership? Is it only when you stand a 50% chance of winning? 40%? 5%?

Our founding fathers had the audacity to think that a just cause gave them license to fight, even though their chances of victory were very small. They put a heck of a lot more at stake than a couple of supreme court nominees. Were their votes wasted?

Can you not see that you lose the moral high ground when you’re willing to support Trump through some of the same weaknesses you lambasted the Clintons for? That some of us will have a hard time not chuckling for the next 20 years when you complain about liberals that attack Christians’ religious freedoms, when you wouldn’t actively defend those freedoms for Muslims?

Can you not see that some of us feel confused that we are the ones having to raise our voices—because we don’t feel like our parents are brave enough to weather political defeat in order to honor the principles we thought they were trying to teach us?

I respect your vote for Trump. I can understand the political calculations you are making, though I think the judicial gains are shortsighted when compared to the precedent that would be set for who we’ll elect and how they can act.

Just please don’t criticize those that choose to vote another way, even if it hurts your nominee. I’ll probably vote McMullin, and he will likely lose handily, but at least I won’t have to admit to myself that I voted for a terrible candidate just because he was polling highest. And literally, that is the main reason it seems many are voting for Trump—not because they like or trust him or think he’s a good option, but because everybody else is doing it. I am perfectly fine losing as long as I stood up for what I thought was right. (I learned that from you guys, you know.)