Thank you, Dr. Buckner, for your carefully articulated and well-thought out assessment of the political options that are available to us Americans, in our continuing struggle to reign in the politicians who wield an egregious level of powers and which, at least some of them, some of the time, and a few of them virtually all the time, abuse their political privilege for their own monetary and social benefits, at the expense of our democratic freedoms and the well-being of our nation.

While I certainly cannot object to anything which you have laid out for our consideration, I think it’s important to note that, as we live in a sunset period of our national democratic union, we all need to realize the growing necessity to stand up for what freedom we have. Clearly vital in this time is the need and obligation that weighs on every one of us who have the privilege and power to vote to get up and do precisely that.

This is no time (and we are running out of that) to rest on our haunches, watching the election process on TV, drinking Pepsis and cold beers while laughing at the election process and the outcomes. This is our Democratic Union that is riding on the outcome of this coming election.

We cannot expect to retain our democratic form of government beyond the next election in November, if we don’t bother to vote, and make the Will of the People heard — and we really must make the right choices. Our Republican Party has become a despotic machine under the control of Donald Trump and his cronies in the Senate. They are interested in maintaining their control over this nation’s Treasury and all it’s resources, and they are convinced that they can squeeze every last dime of profit from our national wealth — and then they can pick up stakes and move on to some other safe haven on some luxurious island refuge, and tell the rest of us to go straight to the depths of perdition, while they drink their own good health and toast our demise.

After they do that, they can establish a new world order that is based on the Feudal model of our historic past, where the new nobles live in sequestered castles, and the serfs live in hovels outside the walls, coming and going only to serve our masters and clean up their messes. (And I suspect our elites would not be above organizing festivals where there are mini-confrontations between their hired military core and commoners like us who may be chosen from among our incarcerated criminals or our rebellious subversives, and perhaps our illegal immigrants.)

This dreadful speculative “fiction” of what can become of our democratic union is not an impossible outcome. Furthermore, it would bring upon all of us (aside from our Elites) a dreadful form of equality yoked to total misery. We would be equal to one another in ways that will bring us all to tears, and we will suffer tremendously in our poverty-stricken equality at the bottom of American heap.

We cannot let this happen to us. But to prevent it, we must take up the gauntlet — at the voting poles whenever and wherever they open for us.

Thank you for your carefully articulated and most instructive contribution to this dialogue. I hope there will be others who have something to share in this discussion.