-- I wrote this after thinking what it might be like without your help.
Dear Senator Johnson:
You likely don't know me in person, and I'm pretty sure I've never met you in person either. However, I'd like to speak with you as though I would a good friend, a member of my family.
You see, we're all family. We're all part of the Great American Family. You, Me, Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, Senator McCain, Dean Cain, Don Rickles, Keith Olbermann, Ann Coulter-- yes, even Ann Coulter. We're all family. We're all tied together because we're all part of this great nation and because what one of us may do, affects each and every one of us in our own way.
Senator, or if I may call you Tim, it is the collective consciousness of two and a half centuries of heritage, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful, that shape our lineage.
When the British Empire put our forefathers under "lockdown" because they dared to ask to participate in the process of spending their own tax money, you probably weren't there. Neither was I. But there was a man named George Washington who was there. And there was a man named Thomas Jefferson, and a man named John Hancock, and a woman named Betsy Ross, along with so many other people whose names would fill libraries. These people live on through the memories they chose to pass along to us, just as Francis Scott Key chose to tell us what the battle of Baltimore looked like from where he was being held by the British Navy, when he wrote what would later become our national anthem. Just as Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and another seemingly unending script of individuals chose to tell us, the future heirs of their legacy, of how brotherhood bested bondage, of how our union defeated slavery.
And we all remember how Franklin Delano Roosevelt reminded us that as long as we don't succumb to our own fears, we are fearless, how his wife Eleanor reminded us how women are just as strong and fierce as men, and in some cases stronger. Or how the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. chose to leave us with his dream of a nation no longer hamstrung by bigotry and prejudice, and how a man named John Fitzgerald Kennedy described our timeless national mission; our torch of freedom- and invited us to take it to the ends of the earth, but only share it with those who are willing, to never force it upon others.
Just as you have your own family memories, our nation has memories. We all remember them. It is with this relationship in my heart, Tim, that I ask you, implore you, beg of you, to make a choice as weighty as the stars themselves: To return to the Senate.
I ask you this, Tim, because honestly, I don't know how much longer our family can hold itself together. We're fighting with each other day in and day out, on the airwaves and in the streets. We're so deeply divided that we make the Hatfields and McCoys look like the von Trapps. And it pains many of us greatly to see this.
So very many of us want to be a family again, yet so many of us want to tear us further apart. And we depend on you, Tim, and all of our brothers and sisters in Congress, to mend these rifts that have grown so vast in these past six years.
I won't kid around. It's an uphill battle. For every step we take to bring us all back together, a great struggle will unfold. Yet, we can't even begin to start healing until you have finished.
Please, Tim, Senator Johnson, I -- We -- urge you to keep us, your Great American Family, in your heart just as you keep your Great Johnson Family.
We'll be waiting for you at the beginning.
Godspeed, God Bless, Good Luck, and Best Wishes.