Dear Mr. Bush,
Mr. Bush, please listen to me for a second.
I am one of your constituents, after all. My taxes pay your salary, that nice salary ($400,000 a year, plus a $50,000 yearly nontaxable expense account) that you’ll be getting for the rest of your life because that’s how much we respect our leaders.
Like you, I work for the people of the United States of America. They, too, have paid my wages as a civil servant, first as a teacher of their children and now as a teacher abroad as part of a diplomatic program to bring peace to the world.
But I find myself in one of the least free areas of the world. That should probably capture your attention because you mentioned “freedom” and “liberty” 49 times in your inaugural address. When your new secretary of State, Condolezza Rice listed some of the least free countries in her Senate testimony, including Cuba, Burma, North Korea and Iran, she also included Belarus, that country just north of me at the moment, where I serve in your Peace Corps in Ukraine.
I’d like to thank you for your monetary and political support in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Your former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, spoke out against fraudulent elections and that helped to send everyone to the negotiating table. Of course, you knew that Ukraine was a necessary buffer state between Europe and an increasingly dictorial Russia, but I’m sure that really you were striving for freedom and liberty abroad.
And so I’d like to point out the fallout of the Orange Revolution: scared of a similar revolution occurring in their countries, Tajikistan has ruled an opposition leader ineligible for this month’s parliamentary ballot, Kazakhstan has issued an order shutting down their opposition party, and Kyrgyzstan has banned leading opposition candidates from this month’s vote while declaring that any unrest will be met with military force. And then there’s Belarus, so close that my host father drove their last weekend, where the leading opposition leader has just been jailed on trumped up charges of “stealing computers”. These countries could use a few lessons in freedom and liberty, too.
And then there’s that country just 90 miles south of Key West. You know, I can’t even legally visit the land of my mother’s birth. I cannot legally see these beautiful places my grandfather talks about. I cannot walk the halls of the National Library of Cuba where my great grandmother worked and talked literature with Reinaldo Arenas. I once defended the invasion of Iraq in print because my family fled a country with a dictator and I thought we had a moral duty to end all dictatorships. I’ve had steadfast liberals say that I’ve changed their mind on Iraq. Of course, this was back before you botched the aftermath (I had to put my head in my hands when you actually jailed an opposition leader on trumped up charges and banned an opposition newspaper, igniting the smolder of the minority insurrectionists into a conflagaration of full scale rebellion).
This letter is starting to swing towards pointing out your hypocrisy and that’s just too easy and useless a target. I apologize. People have been doing it your entire administration and Americans don’t seem to care. Fine. I’m reminded of the political corruption of Chicago in the 1920s, remember reading about it and wondered how people could stand for it, and you answered me, but let’s move on.
You said, to the tune of 49 times, that you want freedom and liberty in the world. Cool. I’m with you on that. But rather than beat the war drums with Iran, help me with my job and let’s stop trying to inflame what few Arabs don’t hate us and instead focus on bring some freedom and liberty to the rest of the world. Why not try Eastern Europe? I mean, there’s no direct benefit to the United States for it, but maybe that will help us to look like benefactors instead of greedy opportunists. You can’t be going for the greedy opportunist thing or else you would have just invaded Saudi Arabia. I mean, it is one of the eight most oppressive regimes in the world and has one of the world’s largest oil reserves and it is the country that bred Bin Ladin, so it tops all the arguments that put us into Iraq. But I guess it’s hard to invade a country when you’ve had the leader, Crown Prince Abdullah, to your Crawford Ranch and you haven’t even paid that courtesy to the leaders of say, India or France. Oh shit. I’m sounding like Michael Moore. Let me change tactics.
I come from one of the most warmongering countries in the world, but I belong to Peace Corps. I come from one of the richest countries in the world, but I am a volunteer, living on $160 a month, paid by the good people of the USA. I’m working really hard to show the rest of the world an America that you don’t readily help them see. And you’ve been doing well. People here in Ukraine (although not all of them) like America. I mean, you helped out on the Orange Revolution. American funds for “democracy education groups” led to the creation of groups that mobilized the protesters, and American foreign policy pressure got Kuchma and Yannokovitch to the negotiating table. A country peacefully moved to more freedom and liberty. America got what it wanted on that and not a shot was fired, and we look good here. So let’s try a bit more of that for the rest of the world, yes?
Of course, no amount of economic pressure was going to get regimes like Iraq’s and Cuba’s to go, so I supported the war in Iraq, and I’m still waiting for the invasion of Cuba because, frankly, I’d like to see this country that has managed to shape my entire life without me setting foot on it. And if you are not going to invade Cuba, at least back off on the sanctions so that your average Cuban can fucking eat. Do you know that meat is a delicacy there? That's who these continued sanctions are hurting. If you haven't noticed, they haven't hurt Fidel and his regieme one bit.
I guess what I’m saying is that since you’re all gung ho on liberty and freedom, I want you to know that I am, too. I'm with you on that. I want freedom and liberty, too. I'm working hard to do my part here and I hope you’re doing your part there. So let’s get to it.
Your friend,
Daniel