Petition Engel to resist Trump and his allies

To the editor:

As President-elect Trump prepares to take office and continues to send all kinds of signals that he will be intemperate, anti-democratic, and in alliance with some of the worst racist, misogynist and anti-Semitic people and forces in America, I am sure you are all watching with alarm and wondering what we can do.

There are many good things we can do to try to interrupt and reverse these trends, and many will take time and hard work. 

But here’s one thing I believe we should start now: we need to get our own elected representatives to be much clearer about the threats we face. 

In that respect, I was dismayed to discover that our longtime Rep. Eliot Engel’s first response to Donald Trump’s decision to install Stephen Bannon — a well-known leader of the “alt-right” movement (read: white nationalist movement) and inciter of all kinds of ugliness on the website he chairs, Breitbart.com — was to say that he wanted to give Trump “the benefit of the doubt” and look for “common ground” with him, and that he “deserves to start governing with the people he sees fit.”

This was an unacceptable response. And while Rep. Engel has since signed onto a House letter opposing Bannon’s appointment, we believe it is important that as many of his constituents as possible let him know that we expect better from him.

So, with the help of my friend Tom Watson [a former deputy editor of The Riverdale Press], we’ve created a petition aimed at Rep. Engel, titled “No Common Ground With Trump” (https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/no-doubt-no-common-ground.)

Please sign it, and share it with everyone you know who lives in our congressional district which includes Riverdale, Yonkers, Hastings on Hudson, Eastchester, Scarsdale, Mamoroneck, Rye and New Rochelle.

Tom and I are forming the CD-16 Citizens Committee, and by signing the petition you’ll be joining our email list (which you can always opt out of). We believe it’s vital that we do more than just make individual phone calls to our elected officials--while that is valuable, forming an ongoing group that can come together more easily around common values, like defending democracy, is something we need to do, now more than ever. 

Micah Sifry