To the editor:

This year’s Fourth of July celebration feels very different. Our nation’s fundamental principles of liberty and justice for all are under siege. The “Big Beautiful Bill” is anything but beautiful. Health care is taken away from 17 million people to offset the trillions in tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy. Punishing the poor and the sick by cutting off medical care and food assistance for so many people is devastating.

Consider the current practice of ignoring due process and going after immigrants, asylum seekers, separating children from their families. Many claim this is a moral victory for American values. It is anything but moral. We cannot simply look away and think everything will be fine as long as we smile politely and stick to conversations about the weather.

How about #47’s excitement about Alligator Alcatraz built in the Florida everglades? Called a detention center, it should be called a concentration camp where people go and are forgotten, where there will be little if any oversight. Thom Hartmann shared this in a recent article, “When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, the first thing he built wasn’t a tank or a warship. It was a detention facility.” That place was called Dachau where people were demonized, dehumanized, and disappeared. The Nazis let Germany know that if you step out of line, Dachau is where you go. If one doesn’t read or acknowledge history, one may say these words are reactionary (which plays well with #47).

In a recent memorandum (warning) from the US Dept. of Justice — June 11, 2025, anybody that #47 chooses can be “denaturalized” and sent straight to Alligator Alcatraz. Dachau didn’t just hold the feared communists it held anyone who opposed Nazi policy, a pattern #47 is putting in place. So much for free speech and due process.

Please find your voice and show up before our nation rots from the inside out. We can and must do better.

Darwin Dyce

Ghent