KEY POINTS:
Dear Mr President: You owe me. You owe me for what you have taken away - and for what America can't seem to find again.
How will I explain the country you are leaving in 18 months to my two American-born children? What will I tell them when they're ready to vote a decade from now and still living with the repercussions of the damage you have done to America's reputation throughout the world?
Do I teach them that America isn't just the land of baseball and burgers - but now the happy home of water boarding and wire-tapping? Do I explain that our new national symbol isn't just an eagle but one of naked hooded prisoners stacked in pyramids like broken chairs?
You owe me for the future my children will have to work to rebuild someday, and I never agreed to pay that price.
My first presidential memories as a child were of a jowly man resigning under scandal. We danced around loud speakers broadcasting Richard Nixon's resignation speech at summer camp. Watergate taught my generation that presidents were fallible but that we had the power to make them accountable.
I saw two reporters and a newspaper bring down an entire presidency by telling their story. I thought then that when Americans ultimately heard that truth, they listened. I don't think that now.
I have watched my country tragically anaesthetised under a president who has done more to abuse power under the shrill banner of patriotism than any other president in my lifetime.
I went back to America recently and the silence of dissent was deafening. Not in the press but at dinner tables. Every day the New York Times or the Washington Post dutifully churn out what America needs to see but people seem tired of listening.
President Bush is still trying to ban access to presidential papers forever - if he deems it. The Vice-President has defied an order to account for classified information for four years now, and has even moved to abolish the very agency that is pushing him to comply.
Dick Cheney has ordered visitor logs to his office destroyed and won't even reveal the names or size of his staff.
The doors of access and accountability for this presidency slammed shut years ago and no one has harnessed the combined powers of the press, Congress, courts and the people to pry them back open. Our checks and balances are grinding along like some slow-motion parody of the Hurricane Katrina response.
At mid-term elections Democrats blazed in under a banner of change and then crumpled in compromise when it came time to put their money where their mouth is and set a deadline for Iraq. They voted to continue funding the war and then abandoned all withdrawal dates like chalk promises in the rain.
Mr President, I do not believe America is proud of seeing Guantanamo prisoners so hopeless that scores have tried to commit suicide by self-starvation, living in a hellish legal limbo that saw the Geneva Convention ignored.
I do not believe America approves of suspects secretly stolen from their home countries and ferried to places where torture slithers under the radar.
I do not believe Americans want to see their Bill of Rights trampled under the ironically named Patriot Act to allow this Administration to eavesdrop on its own citizens, thumbing its nose at legally required warrants set in place to guard against the very abuse of power you have wielded.
But perhaps I have been wrong. Maybe this is what the American people have wanted all along. After all, they voted for you a second time.
The hardest truth to consider is that perhaps their disapproval of you now is not with your methods but at your lack of success.
The America I see today is just waiting for a bus. The anger I once heard in conversations among friends has dissipated into a disgusted shrug. No wonder the prospect of elections looms so large, so early, this time. America doesn't want to see the mess at its feet so it busies itself focusing on the horizon.
Mr President, I want my country back. I never believed your actions could go unchecked over such a long period with so few repercussions.
Today, the real truth is that you have shaken my faith in a system that should have worked to correct your disastrous tunnel-visioned focus years ago.
You won, Mr President, and an entire next generation of Americans has lost. For that, sir, I cannot forgive what you owe us all.
* Tracey.Barnett@xtra.co.nz
