The best antidote to despair is action. To that end I sent the following missive to Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian. For those of you who don’t know, Bastian was a vocal critic of Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg and wasn’t shy about expressing his support for another Trump administration.

What I want to know from Mr. Bastian and all these other CEOs supporting Trump’s vile policies on immigrants is how many Americans will have to be executed by Federal assassins before they decide that the cost is too great?

I know these executions in Minneapolis won’t be enough. Experience has taught us that it will take tens of thousands before you decide that the bloodshed is too much.

Dear Mr. Bastian: 

I have been a client of Delta’s for decades. As a Georgia-raised girl, I believe in brand loyalty. As someone who inherited that Southern superstition and paranoid fear of flying, I overcame both with the help of Delta’s employees, who have always been the best in the business. Once I left the journalism field and went to writing books, I began flying a lot. I routinely make several trips to the UK yearly. In fact, I have one come up next week and another in May. 

That said, I am sorely disappointed that you as Delta’s CEO have complied with this administration’s assault on “the least among us.”  What is happening across this nation is morally wrong. Immigrants built this nation. I have a long institutional memory on the issue of migrants. I remember when George W. Bush, a Texan, tried to get reasonable immigration legislation through Congress, and even then Republicans blocked it. I have lived in communities that are 50 percent Black, and communities that are 50 percent Hispanic. I have seen first-hand how a system set up for rich white men creates a multitude of problems in communities. As a friend of mine in the NBA put it to me once: “You know Karen, I never had to deal with racial problems once I made my first million.” 

Isabel Wilkerson aptly summed up our nation’s failures in her excellent book Caste.  I highly recommend you read it. 

Mr. Bastian, I was a nine year old girl in July 1966 when my beloved father was KIA in the very war that our current president bought his way out of. The loss of my beloved father has shaped who I am as a woman, as a journalist, as a writer, and as a citizen of this country I no longer recognize. 

To see men like you, leading powerful companies like Delta, fail to stand up for “the least of these” and to capitulate to a man who is void of honor and kindness, void of empathy and duty, a man whose sole focus is his insatiable lust – lust of money, lust of women and young girls, lust for recognition – makes me grieve deeply for men like my father all over again. 

Please take a moment and think about your own legacy and the world you may be creating for your own children’s children. 

And please recognize that I am not sending this from a place of anger or rage, but from a deep seated grieving for children like Liam, the 5-year old taken by ICE this week and flown, perhaps on a Delta flight, to a Texas detention center. I have a 5-year-old grandson who could pass for Liam.  This is wrong and in your quiet moments you know that. 

Do better. 

I promise to let you know if I receive a reply from Mr. Bastian or just a form letter. Meanwhile, call your legislators, and make sure to call Sen. John Thune as well.

These are hard difficult days, my friends. Be kind to yourself and others. Tell me what is helping you fight the despair.