Dear Sheldon,

I still don’t know right now if we’re going to be able to call you “Don” for short, because I don’t know how this story ends. After all, I wanted to name you after your great-grandfather, a staunch liberal from the Bernie Sanders mold. (If you don’t know who he was, I am sorry and I will explain old-school Democratic Socialism to you next time we sit down.) Right now, I’m just not sure if any name that hearkens back to President Trump will be acceptable in polite company while you come of age. We can only hope.

Speaking of hope, we still have about two months before my all-time favorite President, Barack Obama, leaves office. If he is able to impart the gravity of the office of the Presidency to a man who has never demonstrated a willingness to listen, then I will note it as the greatest accomplishment of his eight years in office. It is surreal, indeed, that President Obama’s legacy may rely on him scaring President Trump into taking the job seriously, especially after the immense disrespect Trump showed by repeatedly questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s citizenship during his campaign. (Again, if you never learned about any of this, either you’re reading my letter before you’re old enough, or we truly have turned into a totalitarian state. I hope it’s the former.)

So, why am I writing to you now? Well, I wanted to do it in the moment, because this election may go down in history as one of the most important junctures in human, let along American history. It’s just surreal, watching history unfold before you. I needed to try to preserve that urgency, that raw emotion that will settle down in time, so that I can try to impart you with my feeling of awe and existential dread. If a car crash were slowed down, spaced out over a week, and you just got to examine and contemplate it over and over as you watched the glass shatter and the plastic crumble, that would be an apt metaphor for the electoral experience of November 2016. (I digress, but I sincerely hope you find it impossible to relate to my archaic, early-twenty-first century metaphor about car crashes, because I doubt you’ll ever experience one. Remind me to show you a picture of your father actually manually driving around Grandma and scaring her by going too fast.)

So, President-Elect Trump. I never thought I’d say those words. I bought a “Make America Great Again” knockoff hat on eBay when I thought it was all a joke, and I even put down money on an election-betting website on Hillary Clinton to win. I kept having nervous second thoughts, but I thought that competitive Magic had taught me to ignore those “irrational” gut feelings that didn’t line up with the math. Well, I was wrong, and now we’re likely going to see a very different America from the one I anticipated you growing up in.

You see, East-Coast, college-educated, dare I say “elite” folks like us had a vision for the future. We were going to science our way into Utopia. Elon Musk was (and maybe still is) going to put the first manned rocket on Mars, we’d limit global warming by inventing carbon-sequestration technologies and solar power, and we’d even cure aging with the right cocktail of compounds and supplements. Bigotry, parochialism, and maybe even organized religion as a whole were supposed to slowly wither away to the fringes of society, and rationalism was supposed to usher in a new age of tolerance and prosperity. I guess the wheel of history spins both ways, huh?

Look. You know from history class (or from our various conversations over the years) that many Presidents were fairly awful human beings in their personal lives. Kennedy was a philanderer, Johnson was a bully, even Jefferson had numerous children by his slave, Sally Hemings. Trump was just the latest in a long line of Presidents who simply didn’t act with moral rectitude (or much of a sense of compassion) in his personal life. The only difference was, he proudly displayed his moral failings as evidence of his diametric opposition to the forces of “political correctness”.  His base, or “target market” as they term it in business settings, loved it. Many Americans, however, found it hard to come to grips with this brazen callousness on the part of their leader, especially after the quiet dignity of Barack Obama.

I don’t need to tell you, President Trump should never be an example for your behavior, and you know well that we give everyone in our lives respect, and treat them equally no matter what. Judge people on their actions, not on their backgrounds, and recognize that everyone has the freedom to live their lives as they choose. That, not an idealized re-telling of a mythical, prosperous Middle America, is what makes our country truly great.

I am writing to you now, as well, because I believe that history is cyclical. Obviously I have a bias towards Western history, as that is what I know best, but you are a child of the new Counter-Enlightenment. The original Counter-Enlightenment was a backlash to the 18th Century rush towards rationalism, towards using the scientific method as a metric for all policy decisions, both public and personal. It invoked populism, conservatism, and nationalism that eventually led to the overly charitably-named Romantic period. Needless to say, the wars and suffering that marked this period only fully concluded in 1945.

Well, now the European Union is weakening with Britain’s departure, and President-Elect Trump has made overtures to the dismantling of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so two of the pillars of post-WWII rationalism and globalism are currently under immense stress. Should they break, we will undoubtedly slide back towards the same nationalistic, anti-science, anti-progress forces that brought humanity to the brink of destruction in the first half of the 20th century. Even if you don’t grow up in the shadow of a mushroom cloud (and as of right now, I am optimistic that you will not), you’ll certainly grow up in a world much less certain than the one I grew up in.

In the heady days after a consequential election, it is obviously very easy to fall victim to the same irrational fear that drove President Trump’s campaign. My fear is different from his supporters’ fears, of course, but that in and of itself does not make them rational or legitimate. Only careful examination and analysis of what Donald Trump has said and done, and is likely to say and do, will vindicate the left’s fears. You know well that our family tries to be careful not to make hasty, unexamined decisions based on emotion rather than facts. What do I fear the most, and what reasons do I have to consider them legitimate?

Well, in order, here are my biggest concerns.

1: Mere months after President Obama’s administration helped bring the United States into the Paris Climate Agreement, President-Elect Trump plans to appoint a notable climate change skeptic to head the transition over the EPA. I believe that the chances that humanity overcomes the global warming crisis in my lifetime have dropped significantly, simply from listening to Trump’s claims that “global warming is a hoax designed by the Chinese to make America less competitive” combined with his actions to essentially castrate the EPA. This will affect all of us, and it means your world is a lot gloomier than I’d hoped.

2: President Trump has received massive support from Russia, an autocratic state with Vladimir Putin as dictator in everything but name. His actions on this front have been non-existent, of course, because he isn’t President yet, but there is reason to be concerned. If NATO is to collapse, the resulting nuclear proliferation certainly increases the risk that you will see a nuclear weapon detonated over a human population center in your lifetime. Understandably, that concerns me.

3: President Trump has enabled and emboldened certain marginalized hate groups and hateful rhetoric to poke their noses into mainstream conversation. There is a concept called the “Overton Window”, which basically describes how extreme you can get in your viewpoints before you are laughed out of a public discussion. Talking about “the genocide of the White race” as a response to the increasing diversity of the United States was once basically taboo. We’ll see if under President Trump, that kind of talk gets normalized. It worries me that the people who do discuss these sorts of things are likely to incite violence, and if the United States experiences its first lynching in decades under Donald Trump, now you’ll know why.

4: I’ll lump my distaste for President Trump’s remarks about and actions towards women, minorities, immigrants, and the LGBT community together in this one. Vice President Pence may end up determining significant amounts of policy, as President Trump is a political neophyte and has no experience crafting policy. This is troubling for those who thought that LGBT and abortion rights were essentially a foregone conclusion after two landmark Supreme Court cases, Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges. Mike Pence has voiced his disagreement with both of these court decisions, and for all the hateful rhetoric President Trump enables, the most concerning part of his administration will be watching the attempts to dismantle these rights. If you live in a world where gay marriage is not granted the same legal recognition as heterosexual marriage, now you know how unnerved we felt on the eve of its destruction.

I’ll keep the mushiness to a minimum, because I am sharing this with my friends, and I don’t want to embarrass you. I know I’d be embarrassed if my dad shared something like this to Facebook, and I’m doing this before you’re even around to voice your opinion! I am beyond excited to meet you, to grow with you, and to help you become a person of consequence in the world. Now that President Trump is a reality, that excitement has been moderated with a healthy dose of worry, because you are likely to enter the world in a uniquely turbulent time. I hope that I am equal to the task of raising you, and I hope that you will continue the endless campaign for knowledge, reason and progress, even in a time where it seems like everything is moving in the opposite direction.

Your Father,

Ben Friedman