My first political letter to my Trump-supporting relatives in the Trump era.

It's a work in progress.

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On the morning of April 2, 2014, I woke up from a sound sleep with a bizarre feeling in my chest, a feeling that some people have described as a frog kicking. The first thing I did was to check my pulse and it was wildly irregular. It's not a big jump of imagination to think that if your heart rate is varying wildly, it could just...stop.

My first thought was, is this how it ends? Am I OK with this? And, mostly, you know, I was. I was alone. No one was depending on me. I'd lived a pretty good life, with some major ups and downs to be sure, but still I got to do a lot of interesting and enjoyable things, been with some truly wonderful people, and would, I think, leave the world a little bit better than it was when I came in.

But then I got to thinking about my niece and her baby due to arrive any day and I realized that if I were to die that day, she'd always be sad on his birthday that I'd missed his arrival by a few days and we never got to meet. Not OK.

Anyway, I ended up in the emergency room. They diagnosed me with atrial fibrillation, and restored my normal heart rhythm with meds. I now take a beta blocker and use a CPAP machine and have had no re-occurrences. My great nephew is three now and is a delight, a genuinely great nephew.

The point was, that at the moment I wondered if my life was in jeopardy, I could look back and feel that I'd done well by others and myself and that things would be mostly OK when I was gone.

Fast forward to January 13, 2018. Residents of the State of Hawaii saw this message on their cell phones:

Emergency Alert
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII.
SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

It must be that a huge number of people in Hawaii were asking them themselves the same question. Is this is the way it ends? But not just for me, but for my spouse and my parents and my siblings and my children, my grandchildren, and everyone I care for or might ever care for? Am I OK with this?

They weren't. No matter what kind of life they lived and how well they prepared, they knew things wouldn't be fine when they were gone. And you won't be OK either if you experience it. The only tiny crumb of comfort you'll experience at a moment like that, was that you did the best you could to prevent it.

So do that. Pick up the phone. Write letters. Visit your congresspeople. Find a demonstration and march in it. Talk to your friends, and be prepared to lose some. Join a group. Be loud, obnoxious, and raise Hell. And let the world know that you will never, ever support a candidate who thinks that flirting with a nuclear Armageddon is somehow a crowd-pleaser.

Otherwise, imagine yourself asleep in your bed, awakened by the flash of a nuclear explosion, and in that brief instant before the shock wave hits your house and you're buried in flaming rubble, your last thought was that you could have done something to prevent this and you didn't.