Ieyeayeai

Subject:  On the Occasion of Your Second Inauguration
From:  Gail Hudson ieyeayeai@cableone.net
Date:  January 19, 2005 - 2134
To:  President George W. Bush president@whitehouse.gov

    Please do not assume that you and your administration have the mandate of the American People. I am a United States citizen, a registered Independent voter, an American Person and you do not have my mandate. According to the election results, I am in good company; almost half the electorate of the United States of America has not extended their mandate to you.
    It is important, I think, that you understand that this election has aroused the political interest, awareness and energy of a huge segment of not only the U.S. electorate but the general population. We have retrained our political eyes on our country, its policies, its elected officials and, most importantly, its pulse. None of us, whether we supported you or another candidate, is apt, in the wake of this presidential election, to drop our vigilance nor our reclaimed ability to enter into the arena of political decision making.
    Many of us do not believe that this country needs to be healed of the divisiveness of this recent election but rather needs to be healed of our arrogant global insularity and our inability to serve the productivity, health and well-being of our beleaguered citizenry. Our interest in morality is not focused on the non-issues of gay marriage and whether the Abrahamic God is mentioned in political documents. Rather, we ponder:

1. The questionable morality of our involvement in Iraq;
2. The dimensions of modern day political terror (considering that political terror is older than civilization) and what is so distinguished about it that we suddenly need to launch a terrible (forgive the pun but it's appropriate) war against what appears to be an inevitable human practice;
3. The ethical divergence between the Patriot Act and both traditional and documented definitions of freedom in our country;
4. The moral advisability of continuing to allow Big Business to run rampant over the economic vulnerability (which has increased in the last four years) of both U.S. and global citizens;
5. The difficulty of politically determining morally based legal doctrine on the personal issue of a woman's right to choose to abort an unborn human and the use of fetal tissue in stem cell research.

    All these issues, and many more, demand profound, disciplined, inclusive flexibility of reasoning. We who have been energized through the process of last year's presidential election, on the day of your second inauguration as President of the United States, will pledge our intellectual resources to the thoughtful dignity these and other issues deserve and have yet to receive in the political arena.
    Those of us whose mandate you have not been granted may have lost, in this election, the seat of the President of the United States but we did not lose our determination nor our sense that we count and can make a difference, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
    Remember, President Bush, over these next four years, as you continue to spearhead our strategy in Iraq, choose judges for the highest court in our country and create policy that affects the lives of our bedrock citizenry, just because you cannot run for the office of President of the United States again does not mean that, for the next four years, you are allowed to do anything you please politically. The inner eagles of the many of us whose mandate you were not handed have taken flight.

Respectfully, with very high hopes for our country's next four years,
Gail Hudson
One of the Bedrocks

Labels: I, politics