A Letter To Governor Christie

I am writing this letter from a hotel room in Kansas City. I am currently on a family vacation with my wife and two daughters, on our way to visit my family in Nebraska. This is just as well, since if I was in New Jersey for the holiday I would be unable to enjoy many of the great places in the Garden State that my fellow New Jerseyans love to visit this time of year. Of course, that has not stopped you from enjoying a beach that you have effectively banned the rest of the state from due to your obnoxious stubbornness over the state budget, specifically trying to shake Horizon down for money.

My spouse is a public school teacher in New Jersey, which means we will see yet another health insurance premium burden caused directly by one of your decisions. For some reason you have vilified teachers throughout your time as governor. This obsession with attacking people who are building the future while being paid far less than the value of what they are worth has been sickening me for the last eight years. It has been personally painful to watch the woman I love work twelve-hour days trying to teach her students the best she can only to have her treated like dirt by the governor of the state she works for.

It goes beyond that, however. I have lived in many states, but never have I lived in a place where the governor had so directly and negatively impacted my life. My family now pays thousands of dollars a year more in health care premiums because of you. I commute into New York City with New Jersey Transit to work, and every time I have been stuck in yet another delay I immediately think of how you killed a second and much needed train tunnel. I use the Morris-Essex Line to get to the city, and now this summer I will have to find alternate means of transportation, because of you.
This has meant many days getting home later than planned, exhausted from a hard day of work and maddening delays on top of it. Those delays mean even less time spent with my four year old daughters. Not all of us get to take a helicopter home from work.

I have held off on telling you what I think of you because for a long time I legitimately thought that you loved the state of New Jersey, despite your misguided policies. Your behavior over the past two years has disabused me of that naïve notion. Instead of leaving the governorship while you ran for president you stayed in office, neglecting your duties and letting the state’s many problems fester. You did this all for a ridiculously failed campaign that did not garner a single delegate, a truly pathetic performance. After the state of New Jersey had long figured it out, the rest of the country finally caught on to what a terrible leader you are.

Of course, you ended your campaign by pulling a hit on Marco Rubio in a presidential debate on behalf of your new buddy, Donald Trump. At a time when many other Republicans were repulsed by his open calls to violence and racism, you embraced them. You and him are really two peas in a pod after all: lawbreakers with an authoritarian streak who are wholly incompetent leaders, burdened by emotional immaturity on a truly frightening scale. I have to say I had a good laugh when fellow scoundrel Jared Kushner pushed you aside because of your prosecution of his corrupt father. Karma can be tough.

So now here you are, despised in your home state, sitting there at Island Beach State Park in a spectacle of absolute contempt for the people that you are supposed to serve. You have given the people of this state the middle finger one more time.  I sure hope it is the last. I cannot wait for the day when you finally leave office and the man who has been a scourge on my state and my family finally moves aside.

That said, I am sure you will find work on Fox News or as a well-paid consultant and lobbyist. You probably will not face any real consequences for your many misdeeds. This is why I am writing you. I want you to know that you will have a legacy, and that legacy is being hated by the state of New Jersey more than any other state politician has ever been hated. Any contempt you show for us we feel for you ten fold. Despite all of your bluster, your governorship has been a complete and utter failure. If history remembers you at all, it will be as a footnote or a punch-line. If there is any justice in the universe, your name will remain spoken as a curse on the lips of the people of New Jersey for decades to come.

However, I do believe in the capacity for people to change. I do hope that in the fullness of time that you change your ways, and apologize to the people of this state for how you have grievously wronged them.