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Rain Robinson's avatar

Thank you for this essay, and detailing the urgency of fighting back the oppression of this regime. We need voices of encouragement to keep up the pressure, on the fact that we have a fascist coup to overcome.

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Jim Finley's avatar

First, thank you for the work you're doing. Too many are either complacent or cowed - we need more like you, Greg Olear, Marc Elias, and Glenn Kirschner.

This article is another good one. I have one quibble - this seems like a small thing but it's important. As George Lakoff has written about, we shouldn't let our opponents frame the vocabulary of the issues on which we fight them.

With that in mind, please don't call Social Security, Medicare, and the VA "entitlements." They are earned benefits.

My wife and I have both been paying into Social Security for nearly fifty years, and since my military retirement pension is taxed for Social Security along with federal and state income tax, I will be paying into Social Security until the day I die. We both started working and paying into the system as teenagers, and now we're seniors.

Likewise, I earned my VA benefits - I enlisted as a healthy teenager and retired after twenty years on active duty in the Marine Corps with PTSD and a body an orthopedic surgeon told me looked like it had fifty years of wear and tear rather than twenty. I've had five orthopedic surgeries, courtesy of the VA, and will have a sixth next month - that's not an entitlement. It's a benefit I earned.

My wife is also disabled, a senior and a cancer survivor with multiple surgeries in her chart, and she earned her Social Security disability benefits. Howard Luttnick said that if we didn't get our Social Security payments and chose to complain rather than passively wait and hope they'd just catch up later, that would mean we were "fraudsters." We aren't fraudsters. We're just Americans who don't want to default on our mortgage and be unable to buy groceries.

The human rights violations of targeted minorities, the contempt for the courts, the heavyhanded persecution of lawyers and journalists who dare to criticize - I've also been studying history for fifty years, and I believe it's no hyperbole to say this country is looking more like Germany in the 1930s every week. But we need to keep raising our voices. As we used to say when I was in the Marine Corps, they can kill us but they can't eat us.

Semper Fidelis, and keep up the good work!

Jim Finley

Captain, USMC, Retired

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