After 236 years of living together in a nation of our own making, the real differences among us amount to no more than splitting hairs and we got this way together. This election found a Republican Party to be out of touch with this fact. If it is to continue to exist as a major party, its leadership is going to come from moderate Republicans and centrists that progressively steer it along the center-right and meet in compromise with liberal Democrats on the center-left.

The inviolate values the religious and plutocratic right present as sacrosanct do not amount to a hill of beans — nothing more than threatening insults to women, gays, the younger generation and newer arrivals to our land. They mock the nation’s founding proposition: “That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Meanwhile, rational conservatives content themselves with nothing more than finding fault with and blocking anything liberals propose that we the people do. They don’t have a clue of what to do aside from further turning power over to a greedy few that may trickle down what’s left after they have enhanced their bottom line.

Sam Osborne

West Branch