A gentleman writing to this paper accused me of “hating America” because my sympathies are with Europe rather than the obscenity we call the Trump administration. Sir, 250,000 Americans died rescuing Europe from fascism, and we spent $13 billion (in 1940s dollars) helping Europe to recover from that war. Like the New Deal, which steered between the shoals of fascism and communism and “saved capitalism,” the Marshall Plan, as this infusion of cash was known, saved capitalism and democracy in Western Europe, creating both markets and allies for the United States in the face of a Russian/Soviet takeover of Eastern Germany and all of Eastern Europe. Today Europe holds the line against renewed Russian aggression while Trump waffles and prevaricates.
Nobody “hates America” except, perhaps, a coterie of individuals in the Kremlin and the top echelons of power in Iran. There are, of course, those who hate American values — democracy, rule of law, human rights, generosity, compassion, free expression, fair play, and so on — chief among them Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Stephen Miller, to name a few. This is not to say that greed, corruption, cruelty, hypocrisy, xenophobia, and stupidity have never figured in the American psyche or American history, but these are generally considered sins or, at the very least, shortcomings, not values.
American values are why most of the world admires us, wishes to be like us or, in what has become an increasingly fraught endeavor, join us. As the Trump administration trashes our values, the light that so much of the world has long perceived as America is dimming.
Kathe Geist
Charlemont