To the Editor:

I watched the full video this morning of President Trump’s remarks to our Congress and the American people last night, and I hope that all Americans of every political stripe will do the same, rather than just get the gist of it through sound bites and/or adopt the picture painted by their favorite news outlet.

If you try to study the last reactionary movement that swept the Western World in the 1920s and 1930s (the one that brought us Hitler and Mussolini), you will find it a tedious undertaking to gather and absorb the information you’d need to fully digest the events, trends, and circumstances that gave that movement rise. A researcher will try to get the gist of it through selected primary source excerpts and books written by recognized experts in the field, but so much of it was not published and/or is lost to history, so to speak.

Today, I hope you will open mindedly listen, and then research aspects of the President’s words and the reaction to them that you don’t fully and readily understand. This information is all at your fingertips if you choose to access it.

Take some time off from some other less important thing to do so. But you must access it with a mind unfettered by emotions and political prejudices and also be able to filter out the same from the sources you access. The future of our country and this world quite definitely depend upon it.

Randi Kiely

Newtown