The following letter appeared in the Monday, December 8, 2025, edition of The New York Times:
To the Editor:A country with all the wealth in the world that doesn’t provide health care to all its citizens. A country that cuts off SNAP benefits and makes children go to bed hungry. A country that blows boats out of the water with no proof of anything, killing everyone aboard. A country that denies climate change reality while every other country in the civilized world tries to combat it. A country with a death by gun problem so massive we’ve come to normalize it instead of fixing it.I could keep going, but it’s too depressing. Proud to be an American I am not!Scott JaynesMeriden, N.H.
I want to agree with Scott Jaynes that his list of depressing realities is... depressing indeed. Let me also affirm that his listing does name some very genuine "realities." He is not off base! However, I want to suggest that when an American citizen decides that the government has gone off track, the proper response is not to become "depressed" and "withdrawn." The proper response is to take action to change the realities which we deem unacceptable. A friends of mine - who certainly would share Mr. Jaynes' views about the things that our government has been doing (or not doing) - has recently opined that it is "time to give up the myth that we can really change things by voting!"
I disagree - with both Mr. Jaynes and my friend. This is not a time to give up and withdraw from politics and government. It's time to gather together with friends and associates and to reallocate our time to change the depressing realities we are all reading about, every day, in newspapers and online.
Our system of self-government requires us to get involved with politics and government ourselves. If the government is operating in a way that makes us proud, maybe there is no reason to spend a lot of our personal time working on "politics," and seeking to influence our government. But if things are not going in the right direction, as many of us have concluded that they aren't, then that is the time to get more involved, not less, and to do everything possible to insist upon the political and governmental changes that need to be made.
Voting is included in what needs to be done - though I completely agree that voting is not enough. To use a phrase that has always stuck with me, voting is "necessary but not sufficient." Protests, walkouts, boycotts and buycotts, and "No Kings Day" demonstrations (and other such activities) are truly called for, but they, also, are not enough. Ultimately, we need to make the people who have been elected to represent us actually do what we want - and if they won't, or don't, we need to get rid of them, and put into office people who will, truly, represent us, and who actually do what we want them to.
The fact that our governmental system provides us with a mechanism to make sure that this can be accomplished (and voting plays a prominent role in that) is what should make us all proud.
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I am that friend that no longer believes in the myth that we can make real change by voting. I do still vote, if only to honor the thousands of women who sacrificed for 80 years to win the right to vote in this reactionary country. And I still do engage in political action all the time. I have some hope that direct action (boycotting, stopping business as usual, blockading, etc) have a better chance of ending the oligarchic control of this country.
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