To the editor:

Over the past 30 years, the most conservative-minded members of the Republican Party have turned it into a haven for people who consider change a sinful thing — so much so that progressively inclined party members have been treated as RINO heretics to be driven unwelcome from the GOP — a Grand Old Party because it was once that of two forward moving visionaries that were so outstanding that they are affixed looking out on posterity from atop Mt. Rushmore: Presidents Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.

Those establishment members of the Republican Party that most flavor and control it in these 2016-pre-convention times have till now shown little grasp of the fact that the process of history is cumulative and irreversible.

In accord with an understanding of this, past Americans having a respect for in place of a fear of change have joined together in great eras of pioneering and reorganization — as with the people of FDR’s rendezvous with destiny.

Which way might a Republican Party leap or lurch in a contested convention year? Would it be forward into brighter recognition of a need to seek and make progress beyond their party just surviving? Or, will those ever annoyed and insistent on politics and everything else being neat, simple and black-and-white keep the party captive to supposedly great and immutable values etched in stone and fit to be worn around necks as sacred amulets of self-evidence beyond need of explanation?

If the latter holds fast, the party has likely noosed itself with a loadstone bound so tightly around necks that in a blackout of all thought the whole body politic is headed for Davey Jones’s locker. To wit, human affairs are more complicated than are holier-than-thou recipes, potions and talismans, and mankind’s need to deal with and in change does not go away by turning a blind eye.

As a past critic of conservatism with tongue in cheek made note, they will not look at a new moon out of fear of abandonment of the old one.

Of those entrenched on the political left George Santayana said, they redouble their effort when they have forgotten their aim. Santayana might have had in mind establishment members of my Democratic Party of today that seem willing to continue the party’s slide into conservatism via Hillary Clinton’s commitment to ignore the nation’s pressing problems in favor of sticking us with what she insists is “practical.”

Her assurance of little disturbing the status quo convincing enough to some conservative Republicans that they contend they will vote for her if their party nominates Donald Trump.

Thus I find myself faced with what I consider the evil of two lesser — damned by me if I do or damned by some of my party’s faithful if I do as I will on Election Day and write in on my ballot the name of Bernie Sanders.

Well I will unless that other party might come up with an alternative that at all appears destined to be a Lincoln or a Roosevelt (the likes of either of the past Roosevelts would do).