I’m a firm believer that politics should be kept out of our military and that our military should be kept out of politics. However, over the last week, a line was crossed not just between politics and our military but between personal ideology and human decency.
You recently told a crowd of your supporters, upon receiving a replica Purple Heart, that you’d, “always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.”
Mr. Trump, I’m not a campaign manager. I can’t tell you how to run this race. But I say this as someone who knows you. I’ve met you before and you seemed as though you genuinely cared about my service and sacrifice. I wonder which version is the real you.
I am a proud post-9/11 U.S. Army veteran and Purple Heart recipient. When I first joined the military, like many other service members, I had dreams of serving valiantly and one day receiving many military accolades in service of our great nation.
In April 2003, the humvee I was driving outside of Karbala, Iraq, ran over a roadside bomb. The passengers were immediately ejected as a result of the blast, but I was trapped inside the burning vehicle for five minutes. I can tell you without equivocation that the one award I did not want to receive was a Purple Heart, but I got one anyway. And I’ll tell you now, I didn’t get mine the easy way.
I came home to my mother with third-degree burns over 33% of my body. I have had 30-plus surgeries to repair the skin grafts and tissue expanders since 2003. I came home a Purple Heart recipient, but my mother knew that we were only a few heartbeats away from giving her a new designation — a Gold Star.
So far you seem to have denigrated a prisoner of war, disparaged a four-star general who devoted his life to service, and disrespected the faith and the grief of a Gold Star family. Any one of these actions alone would otherwise disqualify a person auditioning for the role of our commander in chief.
I cannot understand why you have continually attempted to dishonor the memory of Army Captain Humayun Khan. You have repeatedly attempted to link him and his family to radical Islamic terrorism by even bringing their names up in the same sentence.
You say that you support our military, but your actions tell a different story. You assert that you have made sacrifices on par with the Khan family. I must ask you; do you truly understand the fundamental difference between investments and sacrifice?
Your reaction to his family’s emotional statement has shown me two things: First, you have a difficult time picking your battles. In the military, this is an important lesson that soldiers learn. You attended a military academy in your childhood and you are a businessman, so I know you understand this strategy.
If your response to this family had simply been to acknowledge their ultimate sacrifice and to say that as Americans, they are constitutionally entitled to their opinions, that would have been enough. You chose a different tactic. You chose to stay in the news cycle with your increasingly outrageous statements of condemnation of a family who, by all accounts, should absolutely be off limits.
How can we trust our military in the hands of a commander in chief who we can’t even trust to comfort the parents of a fallen soldier?
Second, your reaction also tells me that since you have difficulty dealing with the opinions of a private citizen of this country, you will almost certainly have a harder time in the world of global politics.
My 4-year-old daughter has a better sense of human empathy around this subject. When I take her to the park and other children stare at the scars that cover my face and arms, she takes my hand and encourages me to talk to those young children and explain why I look the way I look.
My hope is that your actions and words do not continue to erode our civil discourse. I pray that good people in this country continue to be shocked by your rhetoric because that means they agree that your words and actions have no place in society, much less in the Oval Office.
You have stated that all press is good press. It’s an interesting strategy that has thus far worked for you. But this, the memory of our fallen soldiers, their families, former POWs, and the proud recipients of the Purple Heart honor. This is not the position from which you should be getting your press. This is off-limits.
Please remember that the people you are speaking about, our brave men and women of the armed forces make up less than 1% of the population. However, if you become commander in chief, they will be the people who are going to fight for you regardless of personal politics. These are the people who will defend you. These are their families you are talking about. These are not the people you want to continue to carry out your petty grievances and personal attacks with.
I respectfully suggest you get a primer on the word sacrifice, as well as a lesson in human decency.
I have a few thoughts for you. What I’m not going to do is tell you that you’re beautiful and special and you must love your face. Even though all that is true, I get what you’re saying. I sometimes see my face and I’m like “HELL YEAH I’M HOT” and sometimes I see my face and I’m like “I’ve looked tired since I was 4 and there are too many layers on this thing.” So here are the thoughts of a girl who can feel like your letter sometimes.
1) You see your face all the time. Other people don’t. Because you know your face in and out, when you look at it, you are only focusing on specific parts of it- a zit, small eyes, the weird creases on either side of your mouth. But I promise you, no one else is looking at your face the way that you do. Everyone else just sees your face as, well, you- a gestalt of who you are, a visual representation of your personality. We don’t take enough time to think about how lovely and poetic that is- your face, to your friends and family, represents you. No one is scanning it for ugliness the way that you are. That, sadly, is a burden you alone bear.
2) Find your angles. I have watched every fucking season of America’s Next Top Model, and what I’ve learned from it is that everyone can look good and bad in photos. Photos aren’t a true representation of what we look like, they are just a way to capture an angle. Look at yourself in a mirror with a light source you can control and move it around (remember that video?) until you find an angle that you like. Move your head around, open and close your mouth, do different things with your eyes. Find the versions of yourself that you find acceptable and remember those when you are posing for photos, which leads me to the most important point, which you made yourself already…
3) Just fucking have fun in your life and fuck the photos. Taking photos means very little anymore because they’re everywhere all the time and two billion apps can put them online for others. I find that the people whose photos look the best online are actually having the least amount of fun in their lives. They know how to stop having fun, or worse, how to look like they’re having fun when someone whips out a camera, but they’re not actually existing in their lives. They’re existing on Snapchat or Instagram. The photo convinces them, and hopefully their followers, that they are having fun.
Whereas you are having fun.
Keep having fun. Fuck the photos. No matter how you look in the photos, you know you’re having a good time in life. That’s always more important.
All of this, but: “Just fucking have fun in your life and fuck the photos. Taking photos means very little anymore because they’re everywhere all the time and two billion apps can put them online for others.”
All day I’ve been trying to think about what to say about Donald Trump’s acceptance speech last night.
Obviously, I have my disagreements with the GOP platform when it comes to the rights of women, to LGBTQ individuals, to immigration, to the environment, to taxation, to separation of church and state, and a good deal more.
But beyond those disagreements, I realized as I watched that Mr. Trump was speaking to a group of people who see the world–and this country–in a fundamentally different way than I do.
He insists, and they believe, that we are desperately unsafe, that crime and violence are all around us, that our government is doing a very poor job of protecting us, and that even the police are powerless to stop the criminals who target us and them. He insists, and they believe, that vast hordes of Mexican murderers and Muslim terrorists are streaming or preparing to stream across our open borders and kill our loved ones. He insists, and they believe, that we have major economic problems and that we spend too much money on our international allies. He insists, and they believe, that America is being or has been stolen from the white Christians who made it great and that he is the only person capable of restoring America to its former glory.
This isn’t my America. This isn’t what I see when I look around.
Certainly we have a lot of work to do as a country; certainly there are many, many things we need to fix, including our politics; and certainly there are dangerous people out there. But in general things are pretty good, and certainly they are rosy when we compare things with the way they were in our not-so-distant past. Thankfully, there is actually less violent crime today than in the past; there are fewer police officers being killed in the line of duty; we are mostly shielded from terrorism, at least in part due to the governmental processes already in place to protect us.
So, as I watched thousands of people on their feet, voicing their approval for Trump as he hollered “We don’t want them in our country,” I realized it might be impossible for me to understand this. I might be in a position where all I could ever feel was fear and revulsion for this sort of thinking.
My family came to this country not so very long ago, survivors of the Nazi Holocaust who moved here from Israel for opportunities for their young children. As I listened to the full-throated approval for a presidential candidate playing on their fear of immigrants and refugees, insisting that THOSE people don’t belong in OUR country, I was reminded of Pastor Niemöller’s most famous quote:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I’m not a Mexican immigrant and I’m not a Muslim (whether a Syrian refugee or someone born in America). But I know my world history and my family’s history well enough to know that we must speak out and we must work against this notion that THOSE people make US less safe, take OUR jobs, make OUR country less safe, that THEY don’t belong HERE and that they’re taking OUR country away from US.
We must do this not only so that someone will be there to speak for us when we need them, but also because it is a moral imperative to speak out against the terrible lie that America belongs to a certain group of people and that the appropriate response to feelings of insecurity is to empower the government to lash out at anyone who isn’t part of that group.
google – it is literally your best friend. It’ll answer any question you have no matter how vague
stackoverflow– very helpful website. Helps you answer any questions you may have (code related). BUT PLEASE, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE SEARCHED YOUR QUESTIONS BEFORE ASKING. These are actual people who are taking their time to answer your questions, and they will take your “question asking” privilege away from you if you abuse it
tutorialzinecodrops– tutorials to help you with coding. It can go from very simple, to “that’s way too much time investment for me”
css-tricks – it’s like a combination of helping you code, to asking questions, to tutorials (this is my favorite website)
Also GET A GOOD EDITOR, one that supports syntax highlighting, formatting, snippets, and extensions.
https://atom.io/ Atom is a straightforward editor purely written in javascript. This means it’s a little less performant than the others, but if you only know javascript… that might not be a big deal to you.
https://code.visualstudio.com/ Microsoft’s port of Atom, available on all operating systems, uses typescript (a language which compiles to javascript) and is a little more performant.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ Here we’re getting into some more firepower, Emacs has a LOT of functionality right out of the box. For many this will be more than you need, but if you learn to use it, it might just be all you need. Don’t pick up this editor while starting something important that you need to get done, mess around with it when making text notes, or whatever. Emacs and Vim users don’t always get along. When you hear emacs, think Ctrl-alt-meta. Emacs uses eLisp a lisp variant for extension programming.
http://www.vim.org/ | https://neovim.io/ Again a tremendous amount of firepower right out of the box and the lightest on its toes out of the bunch. If you try to start typing right away you’ll notice nothing happens. The keys on the keyboard are all commands, and to start typing normally you need to press i to go into insert mode. While it has a somewhat steep learning curve it does pay off just like emacs. While Emacs does everything imaginable, vim sticks to editing text. Neovim is a new port of vim, so that you don’t have to use “VimL” the original vim scripting language. Neovim is pretty new, and there’s still a lot of debate of whether it’s ready for primetime.
If you’re using Atom or vscode there are “Emacs” and “Vim” modes as extensions as well, so if you learn the keybindings but find out you must have javascript extensions, or decide you want to learn atom or vscode first that’s just fine. In the end though many many programmers do choose to learn either Vim or Emacs keybindings, and with good reason it can really make programming much more relaxing and quick. Since in emacs and vim all text editing keeps your hands on the keyboard there are arguments that RSI risk is reduced… buuut for Emacs I highly recommend binding capslock to control.
