Dear Charlie,
I started writing these public letters to you in 2021 after the events of January 6th, 2021, and again in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential Election. This letter comes at an even darker time for the Union and for the History of America: we are watching as masked and unidentified federal agents at the behest of senior advisors to the President are conducting a campaign of violence against the metropolitan area of Minneapolis-St. Paul. They are dragging people out of their cars and homes because of how they appear, not based on who they are, or what they are accused of doing.
What we are witnessing is a wholesale rejection of the tenets and spirit of our laws and founding documents at the hands of tyrants, sycophants, and extremists who are dead set on transforming America into something far worse. They have killed innocent bystanders already, as well as people whose only crime is existing here. They have killed, maimed, and injured citizens who stopped to catalog these assaults on our free society. It is now the demand of part of the government that people carry proof of citizenship at all times. This proof will then be ignored if you black or brown, and you will be detained anyway.
I am ashamed at who we have proven ourselves to be: craven and weak cowards who have to resort to threats of violence to achieve our ends.
I am ashamed to be an American in this world. We have fallen so far, so fast, and now serve as much as warning as anything else.
Meanwhile, we have carried out lawless actions abroad in Venezuela, by deposing and capturing a foreign leader. Sure, Maduro is a violent repressor of his people, but stealing a whole leader just to capture shitty crude oil is both on-brand for America, and a step too far. We are also threatening our European allies unless they turn over Greenland to us.
This isn’t how the United States is supposed to operate. It’s anathema to our values. We aren’t a mob boss that’s there to threaten even our friends.
The way that the Cold War was won was through alliances and through the projection of soft power throughout the world. The United States’ cultural values, combined with our business acumen and engineering prowess, was enough to order the world in a way that we could compete and lead a large portion of the economy. We had our failings — Vietnam, Africa, Central America — in that period, but we didn’t need to rely on our armies, we could lead through diplomacy and through policy.
What we’ve become is worse than the schoolyard bullies I faced as a kid. We’ve become venal and cold. We’ve cut off the foreign aid that we used to use to build goodwill abroad. We’ve cut off the free trade policies that made doing business with the world a straightforward endeavor for us and for those who wanted to invest in the United States.
What we’ve become is scared, sad, and afraid, in our leadership. We’ve become less dedicated to even the flawed Reagan model of a shining city on a hill. What we’ve become is a cruel castle, meant to subjugate others, instead of to lead them.
I have a trip coming together for April right now, to visit friends in the United Kingdom and Netherlands, and I am beginning to question whether going abroad is even wise right now. This morning, the President issued direct threads to the leadership of Norway, and we remain threatening to our NATO allies in Denmark over Greenland.
After World War II, the United States negotiated for bases in Germany and throughout Europe. We didn’t demand them, we negotiated for them. Their leases were paid for, their presence was agreed to through treaties and process. If the US felt that presence in Greenland was necessary beyond the one Space Force (sigh, what a dumb name) base, we could be negotiating with our allies. Instead, we’re threatening them with conquest.
Our friends.
We’re doing this to our friends out of fear, out of a pathological need to be seen as strong, when soft power instead is enough to be strong. We’ve quit wielding that power, while the fringe leaders basically say that soft power and negotiation are “gay” and “weak.”
We’ve been fucking around for a year. We’re about to do a whole lot of finding out.
I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that the world you inherit will be smaller for Americans because of all that. It used to be that if you had a US Passport, the world was your oyster. We had negotiated, through that soft power policy, that Americans were free to come and go as they pleased throughout the world. We’ve burned that down over the last ten years. We’ve withdrawn from the world our economic partnership and technical skills. We’ve withdrawn our aid from the parts of the world that need it. We’ve replaced a helping hand with a fist.
The world will be smaller for you, and I am sad for that, as some of my best friends are Australian, Dutch, English, German, Brazilian, and French. There was a time when I could have landed on any one of three non-North American continents and had dinner plans, and an invitation to stay, with my friends in those places. I fear now that those days are behind us. That you won’t be able to build those international relationships that magically make the world smaller and more navigable and richer.
It is my most fervent hope that, as the people of Minneapolis have done, that we present a unified resistance to the continued tyranny of this government’s desire to subjugate its own people and ruin our reputation abroad. We have work to do to stand up for what we believe in. Watching Minnesotans put their bodies on the line for each other gives me hope that we will continue to do the same.
We’re not done fighting, and there aren’t nearly enough of them to bring us all the way down. One thing I appreciate is that we have some touchstones to hold on to in our society. Our indomitable culture produced some absolutely stellar works of anti-tyranny literature. As Nemik said, “[their] need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of [their] authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.”
We’re working as hard as we can to wrest back control of this government from those sad, weak, and afraid people who run it now. They cannot do this forever. My hope is that, by the time you’re ready to be an adult, there will still be something of the America I remember left for you. Or, that at least, I can hand you one that you can help shape into a newer, better, version of it.
I love you, always,
Dad
Cannonball 