To the editor:

I’m addressing this letter to my neighbors who voted for Donald Trump last November.

I assume you did so because you believed that he recognized the challenges you — we — face regarding being able to maintain a roof over our heads, feed ourselves and our loved ones and live in safe and stable communities.

As we close the first year of this administration, I have to ask: Is this what you voted for?

Are you enjoying greater peace or prosperity? Has Trump’s assault on our economy, our standards of decency, morality and our foundation as a nation of laws (not men) made your lives any safer or more stable?

How are you prospering from Trump’s embrace of billionaires? How are his assaults on international law helping you? How are his attempts to look like he’s as much of a tough guy as Putin and Xi helping you? How are his efforts to bankrupt the United States financially (by spending our money like a drunken sailor while the national debt descends further into the trillions) making it easier for you to send your kids to college, buy a house or keep the home you have?

How has his abuse of every ally we have made our country safer? How has pitting us against each other made our country any better/safer/more livable? How does his insistence on smearing his name on everything he touches benefit you in any way? What has he done to actually provide the help you really need, the help he promised you?

To my neighbors who voted for Trump: I don’t consider you to be my enemy. While I probably disagree with many of your reasons for supporting him, your reasons for doing so are just as valid as my reasons for supporting someone else.

As one American to another, may I ask that we choose to stop villifying each other and instead focus on what we all need, what would help all of us prosper? As Jim Hightower (former Secretary of Agriculture in Texas, that hotbed of woke-ism) once put it: “Everybody does better when everybody does better.”

A long time ago — you know, back when America was great — we were told by a president that we the people of this nation are entitled to four freedoms: Freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. We are entitled to these freedoms not because of some royal decree or select status, and not merely because of the once-unimaginable material abundance we enjoy; we deserve these freedoms because we have — imperfectly — made the principles of liberty, justice, equality of opportunity and the integrity and value of individual human beings the foundation of our society. This is our inheritance as Americans. This is what our children deserve to inherit.

To my neighbors: how about each one of us do what we can each day to make these principles more and more of a reality? Our kids deserve it.

Danny Ryan

Saranac Lake