A letter to Republicans everywhere

Imagine this scenario:

You live in a neighborhood where you know most of your neighbors. Not block-party-every-weekend-know, but you know their names and faces and exchange waves as you get the morning paper or walk the dog.

One neighbor, however, is a bit of a loner. That neighbor never comes to barbecues, never passes out candy at Halloween, never waves or says hello when you do.

They look pissed most of the time when you see them. And lately instead of ignoring your attempts to be friendly as they usually do, the person has started flipping you off.

They also start to build a very high, very thick wall around their yard. Hanging racist signs on that wall for all the neighborhood to see, and put some graphic pictures of violence on those walls, too. There's lots of pictures of guns and weapons of every type. They hang a confederate flag and start fires in their driveway as a nightly ritual.

Would you be concerned and worried for the safety of your neighborhood and yourself and family?

Surely not, right? Those things hanging on the wall are just pictures. And that kind of violent, anti-social behavior isn't really a vague threat of doing something?

The rightwing media is whipping people like this neighbor into hating everyone in the neighborhood. It is feeding their paranoid delusion that everyone outside that wall is the enemy, they are people that person has to fear, to kill if need be.

People are talking openly on Hannity's website (and on other websites) about revolution and succession.

Why? So they can keep their weapons and build their walls?

No one's trying to take their guns or keep them isolated.

But they won't listen to folks in their own neighborhood, their very own neighbors among whom they live because they want nothing to do with the African American family that lives next door.

Or the small Latino family that lives across the street.

Or the gay couple who lives on the corner.

Or the [insert non-christian religious group/athiest here] family who lives in the house just behind them.

It's going to take an outside intervention, from people these folks might respect just a little and think of as fellow human beings.

The GOP wants feel like it's part of this country?

This is your chance to take the lead and stop this shit right now.

It's time you acted and talked to your neighbors who are on the fringe and are ready to end this country.

Yours are the only voices that this scared, angry neighbor who lives among us all will listen to.

And if you don't speak up, or you do and they won't listen, then I don't know what the answer is.

But at least you will have done something.

And doing something is always better than turning a blind eye and doing nothing while the most frightened among us turn to violence and war to solve their feelings of powerlessness.