Chuck Park, a foreign service officer has resigned from the State Department in protest of what he called President Donald Trump’s “Complacent State.”
Park wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that although for the past decade he had “worked to spread what (he) believed were American values: freedom, fairness and tolerance,” he could no longer serve in Trump’s administration.
“But more and more I found myself in a defensive stance, struggling to explain to foreign peoples the blatant contradictions at home,” he explains.
“I let free housing, the countdown to a pension and the prestige of representing a powerful nation overseas distract me from ideals that once seemed so clear to me. I can’t do that anymore,” Park adds, pointing out that he had allowed his conscience to be silenced by “career perks.”
Park writes that there had come a point in his life where he could no longer justify to his 7-year-old son, born in El Paso, or to himself “my complicity in the actions of this administration.”
“That’s why I chose to resign,” Park stresses, saying that his mind was made even before the El Paso shooting, but that the tragedy “where 22 people were just killed by a gunman whose purported ‘manifesto’ echoed the inflammatory language of our president” only confirmed to him that he had made the right decision.
He adds that there is no “organized resistance from within” to the Trump presidency, but rather “The Complacent State,” CNN writes.
“Among my colleagues at the State Department, I have met neither the unsung hero nor the cunning villain of Deep State lore. One thing I agree with the conspiracy theorists about: The Deep State, if it did exist, would be wrong,” Park notes.
In an email to CNN, he says that the piece was widely accepted positively with “some mea culpas from personal friends still in the service; some offers of support as I transition to whatever is next.”
“Though we are keeping the metaphorical lights on, we are not the heroes that some make us out to be. The real ‘resistance’ must come from American voters in 2020,” Park told the outlet.
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