You Scare Me, Mr. Pritchett

On a Romanian blog I learned of an open letter written by Lou Pritchett, a retired VP of Procter and Gamble, to President Obama. In it, he expresses a number of things that scare him about Obama. Even being in regular contact with conservative viewpoints, I was still taken aback by what Pritchett wrote:

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

Dear President Obama:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don’t understand it at its core.

You scare me because you lack humility and ‘class’, always blaming others.

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the ‘blame America’ crowd and deliver this message abroad.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

You scare me because you prefer ‘wind mills’ to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

You scare me because you have begun to use ‘extortion’ tactics against certain banks and corporations.

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O’Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

Lou Pritchett

I feel the need to respond, and so here’s how I feel:

You scare me, Mr. Pritchett, because in spite of Barack Obama making history simply by being in the presidential election, and thus being the focus of many books, articles and TV shows, you complain that you know nothing about him. Not taking the time to learn and then complaining about lack of knowledge and blaming someone else for it scares me.

You scare me because I know next to nothing about where any of the former presidents and most other politicians got the money to pay for their educations, and I simply can’t imagine you would be asking such questions and making such insinuations of a president with a different shade of skin color.

You scare me because you’ve lived your whole life in a country consisting almost entirely of immigrants and their descendants, and yet you still harbor xenophobic sentiments for those who had a broader cultural experience growing up than your own.

You scare me because I’m not aware of your having sent a similar letter expressing fears to President Bush, and yet it doesn’t seem to me that there was less to be afraid of under the previous administration.

You scare me because you project the right’s unwillingness to listen to opposing viewpoints, and its tendency to try to silence others, onto those who scare you.

You scare me because you exemplify the worst American tendency to be confident in our wealth and resources, and to take and use what we need, without any thought to long-term impacts or sustainability.

You scare me because you’ve probably always been able to afford health coverage, and apparently have never lived in a society that provided health care equitably for all, and have no sympathy for the plight of those who do not share your situation.

But you scare me most of all because you don’t seem to realize that the problem is not the one of whom you are afraid but your own fear – although I am grateful to finally understand what President Roosevelt may have meant when he said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.