Dear President Trump,

It happens pretty much every time I stray from my baby blanket knitting projects and venture into sweaters, mittens, or hats. The latter need to fit bodies so there’s not a lot of room for error. What inevitably happens is that I work on one of these projects for several days or even a week or two, realize the sizing is off, and end up tearing it out to start over. It generally takes me about 10 or 15 minutes to undo a piece of knitting that conservatively took 10 or 15 hours to make.

I imagine it seems strange for me to tell you about this – who really cares how long it takes to pull apart a problematic knitting project unless one is the knitter? I’m bothering to tell you about it because in pondering this phenomenon I keep coming back to your latest short-sighted, asinine, cruel decision to allow depth sounding in the Atlantic Ocean to explore for yet more oil reserves even though it will totally f*ck the health of the wildlife that live there. I know the metaphor breaks down in that when anyone undoes their knitting, they are choosing to do so themselves and likely can start over again if they want. What I’m talking about with regard to the impact on marine life is more like if my next door neighbor came over while I was gone and took my project off the needles, pulled it apart, shredded the yarn, and snapped my needles. Even then it’s not bad enough to serve as a good parallel since there’s always more yarn and more needles. Plus, my knitting wasn’t alive and didn’t have babies and wasn’t part of an entire ecosystem. The point is that it takes the equivalent of a nanosecond in the scheme of things to undo or break or destroy something that took an incredibly long time to create or grow or develop. And for what? So your donors will get some richer and there will be more oil to warm the globe with?

Did you do an assessment of history and realize that more people know who Hitler was than Churchill and you want to make sure you are at least as infamous as the former? Whatever it is that is motivating you, at this point I don’t really care – I just want you gone. You are a parasite and you need to be stopped before you push the entire world past the point of no return.

May we be safe from you.
May we be willing to protect all that is precious and irreplaceable.
May we speak up for the health of living things that cannot speak for themselves.
May we keep hold of the will to peace, however fragile it might feel.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson