Dear President Biden,
I’m sending along this note to let you know that despite not being a total fan of yours, I’m feeling pretty darn worried about your upcoming NATO trip to Belgium. No doubt all stops will be pulled to keep you and the other NATO leaders safe, but doesn’t it seem like the perfect opportunity for Putin to escalate things by making sure at least one of his fighter jets (and the occupants therein, who will likely be the short-straw-pullers) are shot down by NATO forces? I doubt he’s going to be like “oh, well, it was totally fair since it was in NATO airspace” and sit back and not launch chemical weapons or some nuclear missiles (or both).
I get that showing up in person to such things is what’s expected of world leaders and I get that you all have probably gamed out every conceivable scenario, but this one seems like an unnecessary tiger-poking exercise – especially when the tiger in question is so unbalanced and at least wants us to believe he’s sleeping with his paw on the red button (or whatever the nuclear launch thing is there).
The bottom line is that I’m worried for you and the other leaders and I’m worried for Ukrainians and whether this is going to ratchet up their misery even further and I’m worried about all of us.
And then there’s the COVID surge in Europe. Please don’t let your guard down on that count either.
And on top of that there’re all the ways some of us feel we can obliterate the rights (including to life and liberty, let alone to pursue happiness) of those we’ve been conditioned to hate.
Did you see, though, that Stacey Abrams got to play President of the Earth in the last episode of this season’s Star Trek Discovery? Pretty cool, huh? So let’s us both follow her lead and keep working to push the goal posts out as far as we possibly can while we have the opportunity. This way, when the haters have their opportunities to retrench 1) they have to work much harder and might just exhaust themselves, and 2) they almost certainly can’t get us all the way back to where we started.
Ok, here is your pre-trip loving-kindness blessing:
May you and all the rest of us be safe.
May you keep your wits about you and not get pulled to the warring stimulus.
May you have the courage and the strength to withstand the GOP’s efforts to exploit this situation.
May you accept that the world is literally dependent on you getting this right.
Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson
The Biden Letters 