I’m starting this post at 2:30 a.m. on January 21, as I prepare to board a bus to Washington, joining the Women’s March for human rights that will greet the newly sworn in US president on his first full day of office. Hundreds of thousands are expected in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and many smaller communities. Post-event note: at least 3.3 million to 4.6 million demonstrators came out around the US, plus hundreds of thousands more elsewhere in the world in more than 600 events. I’m finishing it the next day.

Several people have asked me, “Why don’t you give him a chance?” And my father-in-law, a liberal, shocked me with a different question: “He won. Why are you still marching?” Later, someone else asked me the same question on Facebook.

Marching at the Women's March on Washington with my wife and children
Marching at the Women’s March on Washington with my wife and children (from left: son-in-law Bobby, daughter Alana, wife Dina, me, son Rafael)


The Chances DT Has Failed to Take

I have given him not one chance but many, and he has failed to take them. I feel it is my patriotic duty to speak out against his agenda, to remind him that he not only has no sweeping mandate—he lost the popular vote “bigly”—and to remind my fellow Americans that his election was not clean and his behavior has not met any legitimacy tests.

This was already abundantly clear during the campaign. Back in August, I wrote an open letter to DT that called him out for his racism, misogyny, and bullying.

Despite my harsh language, when he eked out his narrow victory, I was still willing to give him lots of chances. But here’s what happened, just to name a few:

I don’t want to make this blog into a book, so I will stop there. I would love to have been wrong on this. I would have deeply delighted in the emergence of a new and different DT, one who really was trying to “make America great.”

My Patriotic Duty
One final reason why I marched: the most important one of all! As a patriotic American who believes this country is already great and that DT’s and/or his surrogates’ policies on the environment, women’s rights, minority rights, education, freedom of the press and other freedoms in the Bill of Rights, and a whole host of other issues are not just the wrong path, but take us down the ugly (and utterly unacceptable) road that Germany and Russia took in the 1930s. I not only refuse to be part of that takedown, I feel it is my duty as someone who cares about my country to stand up and say NO. When my as-yet-unborn grandchildren ask me, decades from now, what I did to protect our country and planet at this critical time, I will be able to stand proudly, as my mother did about her role in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and say that I was there. I stood up for what’s right.

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