I am writing to strongly urge the voters of the 17th District to make Evelyn Farkas their Congresswoman.
When I met Evelyn I felt immediately that she was exactly what America needs and very much lacks at this time. She is kind, smart, and strong, and not many people are all three. But she also knows when to be kind, when to be smart, and when to be strong. This is very rare. I’m a clinical psychologist, and I don’t see this combination very often in regular folks, and even less in politicians.
I emphasize this because of what I see as the biggest threat to humanity in our time. It isn’t climate change, or racism, or inequality, or nuclear weapons, even though all of these are truly enormous problems. For me, the biggest threat is authoritarianism, the political expression of the human tendency to dominate others in order to exploit them. This is the biggest threat because it is either directly causes or strongly contributes to all the other threats.
Evelyn knows this, and has spent her life studying and fighting it. Authoritarianism is everywhere now, in our politics, our policing, our economic and racial climate, and in foreign adversaries who collude with the authoritarian elements in American society. Evelyn will oppose this wherever it occurs, intelligently and effectively.
Some will see Evelyn’s Defense Department work and think she is a warmonger. No. Evelyn is very much a ‘peace hawk’, not a war hawk, meaning that she supports military interventions not to start wars but to stop them. She left a high-ranking position in Obama’s defense department in part because she disagreed with the administration’s refusal to protect civilians in Syria from genocide, a position that was later proven right when enormous numbers of them were massacred.
Evelyn’s basic moral instinct is to protect the defenseless from the powerful. She strongly opposes oppression in all areas, particularly the oppression that results from the grotesque inequalities in race and class that now pervade our once-great nation.
The New York Times has endorsed her opponent Mondaire Jones. I imagine he would be a competent congressman and a reliable vote for correct policies. Evelyn Farkas, however, will be much more. She will fight for justice on domestic issues, and be a thought leader and a creator of needed law on all the global and international issues facing our country.
Our world is deeply interconnected yet full of enemies. This requires courage, principle and intellect, plus judgment borne of maturity and direct experience with international conflict. Evelyn Farkas has this. America has great internal problems, but we cannot ignore external threats because of it. Evelyn will be everything the Democrats want on domestic issues, but can also help lead a restoration of American ideals across the world. Please vote for her.
Sincerely,
Thomas Hollenbach, Ph.D.
