In response to Don Roberts’ Feb. 13 lament, “Battle for America just beginning,” I say to him that I am glad that his generation enjoyed the prosperity of the 1950s through the 1970s generated by the New Deal reforms, but that era was taken away, stolen by the very people Roberts admires.

Though complaining Trump uses fear, Roberts employed it eight times, as usual. He writes about the loss of the “soul of America,” democracy, freedom, “free market capitalism,” the “American dream,” and invokes fear of socialism, class warfare and “the darkness.”

Fear is the tool of those that enjoy socialism for the rich only. Fear leads to anger and hatred and power. Roberts is repeating the drumbeat of the selfish austerity coalition (industry groups, tea party, Republican leaders, libertarians) to get people angry, and to get them to hate those challenging that establishment coalition.

He claims Bernie Sanders is using envy to conduct class warfare. Sanders represents millions of dedicated Americans angry not because society expects them to help others, but because of the rampant and growing injustice.

We are fighting back against the class warfare that has existed since the beginning of this republic. We have never been a democracy and we want to become one. We have gone to the ballot box while anti-democracy Republicans work to diminish our voting power. We have protested for rights, better wages and conditions.

We have fought to honor human dignity and the “inalienable rights” our Declaration of Independence alluded to. Like many other revolutions, ours was stolen when slave-owning aristocrat James Madison drafted the Constitution to ensure complete elitist control of the government. Human dignity and rights? Tacked onto the end to gain ratification.

Brad Sherwood

Waterville

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