My open letter to Dan Savage was not well-received by people like my friend M, a dark-skinned Latinx, who was the first to dismiss it. Although he was my primary editor on the piece, he didn’t like the approach I had taken in writing Mr. Savage, whom I had persisted in emailing, albeit prematurely, failing to cite my statistical source in the email.
Because of this or most likely regardless, Mr. Savage did not deign to respond. I clearly was not important enough, and that’s the reason I chose to publish my letter via Daily Kos because I had something I needed and wanted to say, something that should still be said regardless of, or in fact because of, the recent presidential election.
Did I find a bullshit issue to pick on and basically say: 'Look, Dan Savage, you’re right. These Green Party idiots are just that: idiots. And here’s the living proof: I was one of them'? You can bet to high heaven I did.
Does that mean I am or was denigrating people of color by stating that whites too stand to lose much from a Republican president?
Give me a break. The point of my letter was not woe is we white people. The point was to get some voters to think rationally about the potential consequences of their vote. Unlike Dan Savage, I supported my argument with statistics. Somewhat flawed yet still valuable statistics. I mean, I knew that some if not all Latinx military casualties had to have been grouped in with whites, but does that invalidate my argument? No, it only weakens it.
Can anyone reading this do me a favor? Can you think about what generally is a core constituency among Republicans?
Not just whites.
The military.
If we could have gotten some voters to think about what Republicans had actually done to them—this whole country—we quite possibly wouldn’t be where we are today, lamenting an Oompa-Loompa-faced, narcissistic, draft-dodging-to-say-the-least president-elect, who has shown little to no respect for our military veterans and families. In other words, if we can’t appeal to white voters by showing them how their actions have adversely affected them or people like them, then these same voters will continue to work against our collective interest.
It should be noted that men, another core Republican constituency, also make up the majority of those who died or were wounded as a result of the Republican-led and mismanaged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, at least 87 percent of total documented casualties were men. Again, this is according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, whose stated objective—for those of you unable to view its site—“is to collect and maintain U.S. casualty information on warfighters who have fallen in global or regional conflicts involving the United States.” “The data contained in these Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) reports,” according to the “About the Data” page, “are used by DoD organizations, external government agencies, both houses of Congress, the President…The data that DCAS contains is provided from multiple sources, the primary source being that of the military services themselves.”