Open Letter to Senator Gloria Romero

Dear Senator Romero:

It has taken days of pining on how to enter this fray of uncensored speech—so unused am I to speaking my piece. I have become so adept at censoring myself in order to survive in professional politics that self-censorship has become a bad habit. But now, from the blinding white of the empty page, your tortured face emerges in clear relief, giving me clarity and purpose.

We all have grown accustomed to politicians lying to us and to themselves. A politician supplanting argument with rhetoric is part of the background; we barely take notice. We all have grown used to political leadership trying to stifle speech and dissent, no matter how rational or well founded such speech and dissent may be, whether from the right or the left, from within the chamber or from the public out on the street. In these regards, that is, as a politician, you are in no way exceptional. You don’t do it that much better or that much worse than most.

But Ms. Romero, it is as much the sour air that you bring to a room as it is your naked and pained groping for the right spin, that shows the depth to which your seething anger—your malice—is your true inspiration.

You should know, that no amount of abusing your power, nor wielding of undue influence, no amount of slithering up alongside others whose stars are rising faster and further than yours, will make up for the vitriol that is boiling in your heart. There is something that goes way back to where it was encoded in the reptilian part of the brain, where the initial trauma is still lodged, that you must access and free.

So I say please, for all of our sakes—for the sake of California, the 6th largest economy on the planet—as you point out, the epicenter of which is LA, the ripple effect from which will shape much of California and thus a good measure of our world’s future—please, get some fucking therapy…

PS

And don’t you forget—yours isn’t a political victory if you have to stomp on people’s heads to get them to comply. That is what we normally call bullying. Did you know that there is curricula in our public schools designed to give students the tools they need to stem this destructive behavior? I can recommend some titles if you like. Quite ironic that LA’s kids should have to look no further than the jamming of the Gloria Romero Educational Reform Act of 2006 to see a good example of the kind of grown-ups we hope they never grow up to be.