Dear @realDonaldTrump, I was touched by your thoughts for us here in Cambridge, where we just experienced a 10-alarm fire that left dozens of families homeless. I know how busy you are not laughing at jokes about you on television, holding divisive "victory" rallies in case your campaign and existence weren't already divisive enough, and preemptively fucking up international relations just in case you get impeached before you're inaugurated, so the fact that you took the time to dedicate almost half of a tweet to a humble local tragedy in a town where you lost the election 87% to 6% definitely does not go unnoticed.
You asked how you could help, or probably would have if you hadn't run out of characters, and I know it can be difficult to figure out how to apply the high-level powers of the president-electicy to tangible local issues, so I thought I'd try to help by making a short list of things we need, as we recover from this tragedy, that you are uniquely and personally qualified to offer us:
1. Less hate, less encouragement of hate, less shouting, more listening. Also about 50 units of replacement low-income housing, preferably with modern fire-safety equipment. Make some of them 3-bedroom units, too. We're a little overbalanced towards high-market-rent low-occupancy housing here, and families can so easily get priced out of their neighborhoods even without catastrophic events.
2. A chief advisor without any ties to white supremacy. Also some basic self-awareness that we are a country of immigrants. I mean, a country literally defined and built by every form of immigration from conquest to conscription to opportunity to asylum. Some people around you who embrace this as our most unique resource and the single thing that makes us the most "great" in the world if there's any non-idiotic meaning to that idea.
3. A head of the EPA who is not a climate-change denier, and in general an awareness that science is the basis of civilization and our only chance of not getting ourselves wiped off the surface of the planet like the dinosaurs. Also maybe some extra phone-chargers, preferably the kind that operate based on science instead of on retweets of racists.
4. An education secretary who realizes that public education is more or less the bedrock of any meaningful idea of "public" anything. Also a national education policy based less on standardized tests and more on fostering children's natural curiosity. Also maybe some extra funding for teaching languages in elementary school, when children's minds are the most receptive to learning and are least likely to have already fearfully and myopically concluded that "foreign" equals "bad". It's really cool that your wife speaks multiple languages. Imagine how cool it would be if college dropouts in this country could speak multiple languages.
5. A commerce secretary whose idea of commerce isn't buying "distressed assets". Maybe some role models for how to have successful businesses that produce social good in the world, instead of shitty luxury hotels that highlight disparities in wealth and garish decorating. A national conceptual model of capitalism that is about production more than branding, and designed to reward lifting the desperate into hope at least some fraction as much as lifting the most wealthy into ludicrous decadence and isolation. Also, since you seem to think that health care is stifling business, maybe a national approach to heath care that is tied to humanity instead of employment, and maybe is based on providing health care instead of enriching health insurance. Good luck with that one. Luckily for you, your predecessors have been working on it for a couple decades, so at least you don't have to start over from scratch.
6. Some diplomats who have the right nerdy temperament to read briefings, and/or who happen to already know more about other countries than how to wire money to their banks. I realize how time-consuming it is to actually visit other countries, due to the ocean thing and not all of them speaking English, but maybe some people who eat food from other places, or listen to their music. Incidentally, have you heard foreign music? So good. See if you can get more of that. Also foreign food. Also foreign people. So good.
7. Moral leadership. I once saw a bunch of politicians taking turns saying idiotic and inflammatory things about a non-profit that provides reproductive and women's health services, and then this one guy jumped in and at least was willing to say aloud that the organization does good things for women's health. Be like that guy. Of course, it's totally pathetic that the richest and greatest country on the planet has to have a non-profit to help provide health services to half of the populace, so maybe work on that, too.
8. Infrastructure. And progress, and innovation. Fire-fighting crews from 10 different towns came to Cambridge yesterday to help, and we had roads to get them here, and fire hydrants all over the place for them to run hoses to. A block from the fire is a giant pit where they're digging geothermal wells for the new school they're going to build there. If the school stays on schedule, my daughter might get to spend her last year of middle school there, instead of in a temporary facility somewhere else. So things here are pretty good. Are they that good everywhere in this country? I kind of get the impression that they aren't. Also, it was amazing seeing all that water they poured on the fire. But, at the same time, we have a neighborhood of wooden houses that burn like crazy if they catch on fire, and it's 2016 and pretty much our best idea about putting out fires in wooden buildings is pouring shit-tons of water on them until they're soggy wrecks instead of flaming wrecks, so that part isn't totally great. Also, my daughter's current school had lead in the drinking-fountain water, so that sucked. Maybe, given that it's 2016, we should be trying to get way better at all this stuff. Also at dealing with earthquakes, and diseases, and weather. I guess I feel a little vulnerable right now, so I'd love to know that our national safety priorities are lined up towards keeping us safe from actual things that happen to us all the time, rather than imaginary things like voter fraud and all Muslims being terrorists and all Mexicans being criminals and other stupid shit that isn't happening and was never happening and just makes us all look like fucking idiots when we have to explain to the rest of the world that half our country voted for a giant angry idiot baby even though there are all these real problems that affect everybody on the planet and we're supposedly the most powerful country on it.
9. Coats. It gets cold here. Some of the people who live here came here from warmer places, so more coats are always good. Boots, too. And food. Also the opportunity to travel. Some of the people who live here have never been anywhere else. It's amazing to see a community pull together. This gets even more amazing the bigger and more inclusive and more expansive the community is. I've seen whole cities pull together in the face of adversity. Imagine if a whole country could do that. Imagine if the whole planet could do that. Imagine if it didn't even require the sudden addition of extra adversity.
10. Perspective. I feel pretty fortunate. I live a couple blocks from where the fire happened. My house is OK, my family is OK, my cats are OK. The cats are sleeping here watching me write this. Outside I can hear helicopters coming by to get some news footage of the buildings that burned, and people starting to clear away the burned cars and the wreckage of some people's homes. When things happen, even if they don't happen to you, it helps you focus. This is part of why it's such a good idea to get up every morning. You must be experiencing this, too, having just accidentally gotten elected to a job for which you are totally unprepared and unsuited. When shocking things happen, you can either panic and start lashing out at whatever is closest to you and most defenseless, or you can accept the challenge and try to rise up. Make America Great Again, you keep saying. Who could object to Greatness? The "Again" part is kind of self-righteous and judgmental, though. If somebody comes and says they're going to make the buildings that burned in this fire Great Again, the "Again" part would make sense. We can all pretty easily agree that burned+soaked wreckage is Not Great. But even so, I'd expect them to have a plan. And if you're going to say "Again" to people whose houses haven't burned, too, but who just got way more aware of how easily they could, you're going to need both an explanation and a plan. And a story of how we got here and how we go forward that isn't based on scapegoating and distraction and cheap pandering and bilious dishonesty. And some way to win with grace instead of vindictiveness. And some way to mobilize people instead of polarizing them. And some way to get bigots to defend the rights of people they don't understand, and incompetents to defend the right of the press to expose their mistakes, and oligarchs to abdicate. And some way to fall in love with exactly what we most instinctively flee from. Like, some way for a town that voted 87%-to-6% against you to believe that you aren't just one more arbitrary disaster that suddenly happened to us one sunny afternoon, and now we have to stop all the other important projects we we're doing and put out a fucking fire and help a bunch of people who had been getting ahead in their lives start over from what isn't nothing, because we have each other and even the people you hate are always better than you realize, but what definitely feels like nothing while it's happening.
Anyway, those are some things that would help right now.
PS: Did I mention phone chargers? Super-helpful to have some extras. Twitter isn't so bad, but Pokémon Go eats batteries.
You asked how you could help, or probably would have if you hadn't run out of characters, and I know it can be difficult to figure out how to apply the high-level powers of the president-electicy to tangible local issues, so I thought I'd try to help by making a short list of things we need, as we recover from this tragedy, that you are uniquely and personally qualified to offer us:
1. Less hate, less encouragement of hate, less shouting, more listening. Also about 50 units of replacement low-income housing, preferably with modern fire-safety equipment. Make some of them 3-bedroom units, too. We're a little overbalanced towards high-market-rent low-occupancy housing here, and families can so easily get priced out of their neighborhoods even without catastrophic events.
2. A chief advisor without any ties to white supremacy. Also some basic self-awareness that we are a country of immigrants. I mean, a country literally defined and built by every form of immigration from conquest to conscription to opportunity to asylum. Some people around you who embrace this as our most unique resource and the single thing that makes us the most "great" in the world if there's any non-idiotic meaning to that idea.
3. A head of the EPA who is not a climate-change denier, and in general an awareness that science is the basis of civilization and our only chance of not getting ourselves wiped off the surface of the planet like the dinosaurs. Also maybe some extra phone-chargers, preferably the kind that operate based on science instead of on retweets of racists.
4. An education secretary who realizes that public education is more or less the bedrock of any meaningful idea of "public" anything. Also a national education policy based less on standardized tests and more on fostering children's natural curiosity. Also maybe some extra funding for teaching languages in elementary school, when children's minds are the most receptive to learning and are least likely to have already fearfully and myopically concluded that "foreign" equals "bad". It's really cool that your wife speaks multiple languages. Imagine how cool it would be if college dropouts in this country could speak multiple languages.
5. A commerce secretary whose idea of commerce isn't buying "distressed assets". Maybe some role models for how to have successful businesses that produce social good in the world, instead of shitty luxury hotels that highlight disparities in wealth and garish decorating. A national conceptual model of capitalism that is about production more than branding, and designed to reward lifting the desperate into hope at least some fraction as much as lifting the most wealthy into ludicrous decadence and isolation. Also, since you seem to think that health care is stifling business, maybe a national approach to heath care that is tied to humanity instead of employment, and maybe is based on providing health care instead of enriching health insurance. Good luck with that one. Luckily for you, your predecessors have been working on it for a couple decades, so at least you don't have to start over from scratch.
6. Some diplomats who have the right nerdy temperament to read briefings, and/or who happen to already know more about other countries than how to wire money to their banks. I realize how time-consuming it is to actually visit other countries, due to the ocean thing and not all of them speaking English, but maybe some people who eat food from other places, or listen to their music. Incidentally, have you heard foreign music? So good. See if you can get more of that. Also foreign food. Also foreign people. So good.
7. Moral leadership. I once saw a bunch of politicians taking turns saying idiotic and inflammatory things about a non-profit that provides reproductive and women's health services, and then this one guy jumped in and at least was willing to say aloud that the organization does good things for women's health. Be like that guy. Of course, it's totally pathetic that the richest and greatest country on the planet has to have a non-profit to help provide health services to half of the populace, so maybe work on that, too.
8. Infrastructure. And progress, and innovation. Fire-fighting crews from 10 different towns came to Cambridge yesterday to help, and we had roads to get them here, and fire hydrants all over the place for them to run hoses to. A block from the fire is a giant pit where they're digging geothermal wells for the new school they're going to build there. If the school stays on schedule, my daughter might get to spend her last year of middle school there, instead of in a temporary facility somewhere else. So things here are pretty good. Are they that good everywhere in this country? I kind of get the impression that they aren't. Also, it was amazing seeing all that water they poured on the fire. But, at the same time, we have a neighborhood of wooden houses that burn like crazy if they catch on fire, and it's 2016 and pretty much our best idea about putting out fires in wooden buildings is pouring shit-tons of water on them until they're soggy wrecks instead of flaming wrecks, so that part isn't totally great. Also, my daughter's current school had lead in the drinking-fountain water, so that sucked. Maybe, given that it's 2016, we should be trying to get way better at all this stuff. Also at dealing with earthquakes, and diseases, and weather. I guess I feel a little vulnerable right now, so I'd love to know that our national safety priorities are lined up towards keeping us safe from actual things that happen to us all the time, rather than imaginary things like voter fraud and all Muslims being terrorists and all Mexicans being criminals and other stupid shit that isn't happening and was never happening and just makes us all look like fucking idiots when we have to explain to the rest of the world that half our country voted for a giant angry idiot baby even though there are all these real problems that affect everybody on the planet and we're supposedly the most powerful country on it.
9. Coats. It gets cold here. Some of the people who live here came here from warmer places, so more coats are always good. Boots, too. And food. Also the opportunity to travel. Some of the people who live here have never been anywhere else. It's amazing to see a community pull together. This gets even more amazing the bigger and more inclusive and more expansive the community is. I've seen whole cities pull together in the face of adversity. Imagine if a whole country could do that. Imagine if the whole planet could do that. Imagine if it didn't even require the sudden addition of extra adversity.
10. Perspective. I feel pretty fortunate. I live a couple blocks from where the fire happened. My house is OK, my family is OK, my cats are OK. The cats are sleeping here watching me write this. Outside I can hear helicopters coming by to get some news footage of the buildings that burned, and people starting to clear away the burned cars and the wreckage of some people's homes. When things happen, even if they don't happen to you, it helps you focus. This is part of why it's such a good idea to get up every morning. You must be experiencing this, too, having just accidentally gotten elected to a job for which you are totally unprepared and unsuited. When shocking things happen, you can either panic and start lashing out at whatever is closest to you and most defenseless, or you can accept the challenge and try to rise up. Make America Great Again, you keep saying. Who could object to Greatness? The "Again" part is kind of self-righteous and judgmental, though. If somebody comes and says they're going to make the buildings that burned in this fire Great Again, the "Again" part would make sense. We can all pretty easily agree that burned+soaked wreckage is Not Great. But even so, I'd expect them to have a plan. And if you're going to say "Again" to people whose houses haven't burned, too, but who just got way more aware of how easily they could, you're going to need both an explanation and a plan. And a story of how we got here and how we go forward that isn't based on scapegoating and distraction and cheap pandering and bilious dishonesty. And some way to win with grace instead of vindictiveness. And some way to mobilize people instead of polarizing them. And some way to get bigots to defend the rights of people they don't understand, and incompetents to defend the right of the press to expose their mistakes, and oligarchs to abdicate. And some way to fall in love with exactly what we most instinctively flee from. Like, some way for a town that voted 87%-to-6% against you to believe that you aren't just one more arbitrary disaster that suddenly happened to us one sunny afternoon, and now we have to stop all the other important projects we we're doing and put out a fucking fire and help a bunch of people who had been getting ahead in their lives start over from what isn't nothing, because we have each other and even the people you hate are always better than you realize, but what definitely feels like nothing while it's happening.
Anyway, those are some things that would help right now.
PS: Did I mention phone chargers? Super-helpful to have some extras. Twitter isn't so bad, but Pokémon Go eats batteries.