From the Office of Senator Charles M. Wexler (D–Anywhere, USA)
April 2st, 2025
Dear friends, neighbors and fellow voters,
Each week I send this letter to you to recap important events and policies that transpired here in Washington DC and will affect my home district. My tone is usually optimistic and I attempt to reassure you, my constituents. However tonight, I am exhausted and beleaguered. Today, on the Senate floor, a colleague – dressed in a tactical vest stitched with an American flag and a pocket Constitution he has clearly never opened – read aloud from Atlas Shrugged and declared that “unregulated freedom is the only path to order.”
Minutes later, the same Senator voted to dissolve the Department of Housing and Urban Development, on the grounds that shelter makes people ‘soft & dependent’. Another introduced legislation to deregulate efficiency standards for walk-in coolers.
But yet, it was just another Tuesday in Magaland. These are the times we live in.
We are living through a time in which absurdity has not merely infiltrated our institutions – it commands them. Where once we debated the limits of government power, we now spend our days watching men who cannot define “tariff” attempt to reconstruct the Gilded Age using memes, grudges, and chainsaws.
I want to tell you that this is temporary.
I want to promise you that better days are just on the other side of this fever dream.
But I will not lie to you.
This is not a fever. This is a condition.
The President’s new tariff policy—crafted, it seems, with a cocktail napkin and a dartboard, has already vaporized billions in market value. American industries are whiplashing. Families stare at rising costs with growing dread. Our allies are confused. Our adversaries are emboldened. And our future is being traded, day by day, for a slot on the evening broadcast and one more “own the libs” moment shouted through a bullhorn of grievance.
And yet.
And yet.
I decline to accept the end of Democracy.
I decline to accept this version of America as its final form: bloated with insolent rage, starved of empathy, and ruled by whichever strongman shouts loudest at the algorithm. I decline to accept a Democracy measured only in likes, tweets and threats.
We have become creatures too accustomed to fear itself – so steeped in absurdity that we accept it as routine, so battered by noise that we mistake silence for safety.
But I believe – because I must – that something deeper remains.
Not just law. Not just process.
But the old truths, now nearly drowned beneath the floodwaters of cynicism and cash:
Compassion.
Sacrifice.
Courage.
Dignity.
A belief in something greater than our next dopamine spike. A belief in something greater than outrage.
These are not obsolete ideas. They are the only ones that last.
And though my voice is hoarse from shouting into a chamber that will not listen, though my inbox is filled with death threats, though I sometimes stare at the Capitol dome and wonder what’s left to salvage…
I rise.
I speak.
Because that is what is required.
Not because I am brave. But because the alternative is to surrender this experiment to those who would reduce it to spectacle and slogan.
You may ask what good this letter does. I ask myself the same. But I believe words still matter. I believe that truth – spoken plainly and with conviction – still has weight.
And so I tell you this:
You are not crazy. This is happening.
But you are not alone.
And you are not powerless.
And this fight, though exhausting, is still worth everything.
We are the keepers of the flame, you and I – not of nostalgia, but of possibility. And we must carry it, even when it flickers. Especially then.
I believe we will not just endure.
I believe, if we choose, we can still prevail. This experiment in Democracy can prevail.
But for now, for tonight… I need a drink.
With whatever hope remains,
Senator Charles M. Wexler
United States Senate
District of Somewhere Still Worth Saving
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