Politics
"Parks and Recreation"/NBC
Published by Yahoo, the letter opened with an appeal for donations to the ACLU, which has vowed to fight Trump in court if he were to challenge civil liberties, and the International Rescue Committee, which provides relief services to refugees.
Knope, a middle-management government worker in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana, began the letter by expressing her own level of sadness over Trump's win.
"Amidst the confusion, and despair, and disbelief, it was suggested to me by a very close friend of mine," wrote Knope, who revealed the close friend was Rashida Jones' character Ann, "that perhaps a few people would enjoy hearing my thoughts on this election. So I sat down at my computer, cleared my head, and opened a document. Then I started crying."
Fans of the show will remember that Hillary Clinton was one of the character's role models. And while Clinton never got to appear on the show, she expressed an interest in watching "Parks and Rec" in one of the emails released as part of the investigation into her use of a private server.
The letter goes on to tell a story from Knope's fourth-grade class. She and her classmates read a story about "two fictional candidates: a smart if slightly bookish-looking cartoon tortoise named Greenie, and a cool-looking jaguar named Speedy."
The students had to argue which one would make a better class president. But as it was looking like the children would pick Speedy, one kid introduced a third candidate: "a T-Rex named Dr. Farts who wears sunglasses and plays the saxophone, and his plan is to fart as much as possible and eat all the teachers."
Dr. Farts won the election, which left Leslie saddened. She was the only one who voted for the sensible choice. Her teacher then told her the exercise's lesson: "People are unpredictable, and democracy is insane."
But the idea Knope wanted to get across was that democracy is still better than other forms of government, even if it doesn't go your way.
"The point is: people making their own decisions is, on balance, better than an autocrat making decisions for them," she wrote. "It's just that sometimes those decisions are bad, or self-defeating, or maddening."