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An open letter to Jill Stein [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-09-10

UPDATE: Reaction to this diary is a resounding “FUCK YOU, Jill Stein”. Got it.

To be clear, I have zero interest in defending her. I don’t support her and never have. I have no idea who she is as a person. I am 100% behind Kamala. In fact, “far from perfect” was a bad choice, it adds nothing, so I struck it.

What I should have mentioned is that these letters I’ve been writing, especially this one in particular, have one purpose. To convince someone to take what I believe is the right course of action. That’s it. Now if that someone is a raging narcissist, I try to adapt. If I don’t agree with someone on a single issue other than trump, I adapt. I want them to be as receptive as possible to the message.

I wrote to Dick Fucking Cheney three months ago. I have very few nice things to say about the man in normal conversation. The question is, does he have at least some humanity left to appeal to? I think he does. I’m guessing most here disagree. But the way I see it, right now it’s either trump or not trump. Fascism or not. And, at least in this moment, he picked correctly. So yeah, I didn’t mention Iraq, Haliburton, climate change or women’s rights. I did appeal to his sense of patriotism and asked him to forcefully denounce trump. He probably never read it, but if he did, he probably appreciated the sentiment. Maybe it had some effect.

Now if Jill Stein is really a Putin stooge, if she’s as corrupt as everyone here says, this obviously doesn’t work. I knew about her dinner with Putin and other shitstains like Flynn. When I researched it, I thought she had a halfway decent explanation. I was probably wrong.

And so I probably shouldn’t have picked this particular person, this letter, to illustrate some of the points I wanted to make. Do I think Jill Stein is a “decent, caring” person? No clue. Apparently she’s not.

END UPDATE

Ok, Jill Stein is not going to read this diary. There’s an infinitesimally small chance she’ll ever see the letter I wrote late last night, and an even smaller chance it would have any impact on her anyway.

I know this. I don’t care. I was lying in bed, thoughts swirling, the fear starting to take hold, as has become common now that we’re weeks away from finding out whether the American experiment in democracy lives or dies. At these times, doing anything is better than doing nothing. So I picked a name on my list and started writing.

It’s a list of specific people I’ve wanted to write to before this election. Former politicians, media personalities, celebrities. Mostly just notes of encouragement to people campaigning for Harris and pleas to others to be more vocal against trump and for Harris. I plan to write Mark Milley, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, and H. R. McMaster, who all served under trump, urging them to publicly endorse Harris.

It’s like postcards to voters (highly recommended, try it!), just tailored to a specific person who happens to have potentially more influence. Someone whose voice can reach a lot of people and whose decisions could have a real impact. It sounds stupid, but sometimes I wonder if, for any situation, there’s a "perfect" combination of words that can make something seemingly impossible happen. Like convincing someone to take action when nothing else will. Or changing someone's mind. This letter is my super-long-shot attempt at convincing Jill Stein to stop playing spoiler and get the fuck out of the race.

Part of the reason for this diary is because I’m no longer on the socials. I can usually dig up an email address, like when I wrote to Peter Baker at the NY Times about his bothsidesism (he replied), Biden’s campaign manager about an ad idea (probably ignored me), and Aileen Cannon about… well, I probably just pissed her off. At least I knew they saw it. In this case, I have no clue other than the generic email or comment form on her campaign site. I guess Xitter is a better option, but I left that cesspool the second musk took over. If a bunch of people DM’ed her on whatever platform, maybe she’d take notice. Or maybe an online petition?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Anything to increase the odds of her, and not just some handler, actually seeing it. Or if you have feedback on the letter itself. Or the general idea of contacting certain well known people. Am I just wasting my time?

Finally, the letter:

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/10/2269141/-An-open-letter-to-Jill-Stein?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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