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I am overwhelmingly discouraged, disappointed, dismayed and flabbergasted at the total lack of awareness and/or intentional refusal to look at the facts that are currently facing our nation and its rapid descent into fascism unless we wake up!

It’s amazing how some are so aghast that we might become a socialist country. May I remind you of some of the “socialist” benefits that the majority of us have?

• Fire Department

• Police Department

• Libraries

• Public Education

• Medicare/Medicaid

• Social Security

• Roads/Highways/Interstates

So, if you no longer want the “socialist” privileges we all are so fortunate to partake of, then go ahead, hire your own fire and police forces, and drive only on your own driveway!

But, for reasons that shock me into states of incredulous thinking, you want a fascist dictator to run our country? What happened to your history lessons -— where has all that knowledge gone?

Instead of tuning in to the totally comprehensive research that the Jan. 6 Committee has put before everyone in this country, you instead believe the lies put out by a malignant psychopath who wants nothing for you, who is only in this for his own sense of power and all under a guise of religion. Again, remember all the gullible people who believed Hitler and Mussolini.

The Jan. 6 Committee, for those who are turning a blind eye, have primarily Republican players testifying. Trump’s own family, his lawyers, his cabinet members, his White House staffers and more told him he lost the election! And yet you, who again refuse to listen to and/or hear the facts, will suffer the consequences of a man-child who never learned how to gracefully submit to the truth.

Your children and grandchildren will be living in a third world country at this rate. We were once in the top tier educationally, now we’re ranked below Vietnam. We have more infant deaths than any other economically similar nation; and now that the male religious right (not scientists, mind you) are making the rules as to what women can and cannot do with their own bodies, we will see even more compromised pregnancies go without medical care due to the fears that doctors now face navigating post Roe v. Wade laws. And on top of that, the non-scientific minds of the DIS-honorable Supreme Court justices have taken away the ability of the EPA to regulate CO2 and methane (the two most powerful destructive gases in our atmosphere.)

I’m old, I chose to not bring children onto a planet that already has over extended itself with humans, as we continue to denounce the importance of the rest of the animals and plants we need for our very own survival.

So,  why should I care? Because life, all life, is precious and a good number of the uninformed are purposefully destroying it all.

Roberta Mistretta

Austin, MN