This mess we’re in? It has nothing to do with politics.
The current President is a court-adjudicated rapist who recently paid nearly 6 million dollars in damages for sexual assault and defamation.
His name appears tens of thousands of times in the Epstein Files, and he has been credibly accused by dozens of women of sexual assault and harassment.
He is a 34-count felon, indicted four separate times, with 88 charges, ranging from fraud to election interference.
The only reason he is not in prison right now is that he has assumed the Presidency and marshalled the vast resources of the office to pervert our judicial and legal processes.
Despite all of this, we still have family members, friends, former friends, and neighbors who would vote for him again right now.
In what universe, in what iteration of this nation over the last 250 years, would a being this bereft of human decency have been tolerated in office, let alone passionately embraced?
In what political movement would rape and treason not be dealbreakers?
The answer is none.
This isn’t a political fracture.
I wish it were, though, as that would be relatively easy to navigate.
We are not a nation, as we’ve often thought, simply positioned on either side of the aisle working to craft reasonable, good-faith compromise somewhere in the humane middle. Sadly, that ship left the port a long time ago.
We aren’t even contending with a blind political tribalism that sees party over country, as the GOP of a decade ago has long since been rendered unrecognizable, abandoning its calls for a limited Government in exchange for unabashed authoritarianism.
The prevailing narrative of the last decade is that America has been fractured by political ideologies, bunkered down in disagreement on what path will most serve the common good. This is a dangerous fiction we need to discard once and for all.
The dividing lines in America have nothing to do with party affiliation anymore.
Just open up your phone, eavesdrop at the checkout line, or talk to your neighbor, and you’ll see the lines along which we now find ourselves:
One side celebrates innocent people being assassinated in front of their children, without due process.
One side rejoices in strangers going without food or medical care or housing, without knowing a single one of their stories.
One side applauds the bombing of foreign school children and the destruction of entire populations.
One side blindly despises other people for their gender identity, despite it having no impact on their lives whatsoever.
One side reduces an entire population to terrorists and drug dealers to justify their swift eradication.
One side conflates whiteness with righteousness.
One side defends the protection of pedophiles.
One side steadfastly worships a felonious, treasonous rapist.
And none of this is about politics; it’s about when faced with the suffering and injustice in our path, whether we will default to compassion or to cruelty.
America’s present divide reveals the orientation of hearts as we move through the world, the story we tell ourselves about other people, and what we want our lives to be marked by.
Will we be bleeding-heart empaths who err on the side of love toward all our neighbors, or callous, f your feelings sociopaths who rejoice in the pain of others because we’ve dehumanized them to the point that their lives are worthless to us?
Will we see empathy as our highest calling as human beings, or as a character flaw needing to be discarded?
One of the greatest lies we’re asked to accept as gospel is that all opinions are valid, that every position is somehow equally worthy of merit and deserving of consideration. We’re often led to believe that in every situation where an impasse is reached, the most humane response is to “agree to disagree”.
Of course, we can disagree on all sorts of issues without that disagreement being a , but there are some things that, as people of faith, morality, and conscience, we simply will not allow—and these things transcend politics.
The days ahead are going to require us to dig beneath the surface skirmishes and into the bedrock of what’s really happening here so that we don’t waste a second fighting fruitless battles that miss the point entirely.
Refuse to be gaslit and guilted for allowing “politics” to get in the way of your relationships because that’s not what’s happening here. This is an effort by people around us to sidestep conversations that call them to accountability for their beliefs, choices, and alignments.
It’s time we stopped pretending that our current national crisis is political, as that only serves to distract us from the far more worrisome truth that we need to reckon with:
We’re not politically divided; we are morally fractured.
We are not fighting legislative battles but a war to stay human or abandon our humanity altogether.
No election result will change that.
No power balance in Congress will remedy it.
No dictator’s expulsion will heal the brokenness of the people around us.
The question is, what will?
3 comments
When Obama gave his speech at the DNConventon, it seemed to be their practice for the person to give this speech to be their next Presidential candidate, next time around. I was impressed with his speech and knew he would be a good choice. I also knew how “different” his election would be. How “color blind” would vanish for many people, unfortunately.
I was raised as a white kid on the white side of town, in a more blue-collar area of upward-bound middle-class people. I did not have any kids of color in my grade school, but junior high and high school did. They were kids like me, just a different skin color and family culture. I knew that college was in my future, so that was a long-term aim.
When I started to go places with my father, we went to places where there were black people. “Good” black people who “knew their place”, but did very good jobs and were cherished for that, but at lower pay levels. He was a good man, with a wife and several daughters. One was my age. I came to be around her more in high school.
Jesse had several jobs that I knew of. He was liked as he worked hard and did what he could to do a good job. A model employee, some might say. His retirement job was as the grounds keeper at the local post office. The grass never looked as good as it should have to be a government building, for years. Sometimes better than others. Until Jesse got the job.
Slowly, he mowed and weeded the yard until it was all grass, once again. If a weed appeared, he removed it carefully. Soon the grass was thick enough it kept them out. It was flawless! For years! When Jesse retired, some “white guy” got the job and the grass slowly went back to its prior condition.
I have no doubt that if Jesse had been sitting on the ground, removing new non-grass growths, that if a well-to-do white lady had walked by on her way into the post office, she probably looked over and smiled at him. He’s smile back. As she probably considered that that was the best job he could hold, being black and all. That unspoken truth, to her.
In 1963, the local school board voted to integrate. They consulted the black school in town to see if they wanted to. The black kids in high school were bussed to an an area big city, but the lower grades were done locally. Everybody agreed, as it was obvious this was the wave of the future.
I came to know of the different drinking fountains, rest rooms, and black seating areas at restaurants and on transit busses. This always seemed a bit odd to me, back then, but I also knew “that was the way it was”.
When Obama was elected, the covert racism of the time emerged. I was sorry to see that happen. It was presumed that all blacks voted for him to get him elected. The black Republicans resented that, big time.
This covert racism was so strong that few saw the many good things Obama did or tried to do. How he dug us out of the GWBush declining economy. How his measured approach got things done for the country, which benefited many, if not all of us.
This racism also served to demonize Democrats and what they stood for. As Republicans moved farther to the right, that left prior-centrists to be “radical left” compared to where the right had moved farther right.
Thren here comes Trump. Claiming he can “fix things”. Make better deals. Speaking simply, with word choice and word sequence that many believed. Many of them had seen him on TV and liked what they saw. A “man of power who knew how to do things”. They did not consider “the big con”, though. They bit for it, hook, line, and sinker. And they still do! They believed everything he said, although fact checks proved that of all he said, 62% of it was untrue. Agreed, in prior times, that would have been a deal-breaker, but not this time. If somebody said something bad about them, he demonized THEM instead. FEW of his followers noticed this.
Trump’s presidency has been one, long educational program, should anybody care to watch. How he altered how laws were followed or not followed. How he has not fully upheld the US Constitution, which he took an oath to follow and uphold. AND how he has surrounded himself with people who get their “glory” by being his servants. The earlier “clown car” references do not come close to describing how flaky things can be.
And HEE WE ARE! Things that used to make sense, seeming do not any more. Things that used to be honorable, do not matter any more. Republicans have gotten to a place where they perceive they cannot be held accountable for anything, anymore. In their eyes, “They are the best at everything, even spending money on things they want to spend money on”. Democrats are considered to spend wastefully in anything they might do, according to them. They don’t want to spend money or pay taxes to support such spending, so the federal deficit has skyrocketed under Republican administrations. Yet the only time they get concerned about its amount is when a Democrat is President.
One thing I came to realize decades ago is that black people can see things white people cannot. And they are right! As they can see these things and know what they are looking at, WE NEED ANOTHER BLACK PRESIDENT, EVEN IF SHE IS A FEMALE.
I Kamala runs, it would be very easy for her to list all of the things Trump has done that are dishonest/illegal, hold that list up, and truthfully say “I TOLD you this would happen. And it did. Look at how much MORE we could have accomplished, as a country, IF you had elected me instead.”
Our nation might be fractured, but it seems the only way to start to fix that is to VOTE BLUE, NO MATTER WHO THE CANDIDATE IS. THEN ensure that candidate is the best person for the job, no matter what. With no skeletons in the cellar.
We had a black man as a president. And that broke the country. Not because he was incompetent or evil. But that he was black, and that has made the white supremacists, and even the whites who pretend to be open minded, go into a tailspin. So they gave us the most incompetent and racist person to replace him with. That is what this all comes down to. Not empathy. Or any policies that a politician has. But the fact that this country still hasn’t dealt with it’s racism. And is still trying to bury its head in the sand right now.
Agreed 100%.