The words Walter Reed showed up on my timeline over the weekend.
I confess that my heart fluttered, my spirit quickened, and I pulled out our corkscrew and put it on the counter, just in case.
A few hours later… false alarm.
Party postponed.
Humanity, still hostage.
Unfettered lunatic, still at the wheel.
Annihilation, still in play.
Hellscape, still fully ablaze.
While I would never wish anyone harm, I will rejoice the day he leaves the planet.
I feel no shame in saying this.
It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
And I will be far from alone in my elation.
When he departs this mortal sphere, it will be an occasion of global jubilation, not unlike the passing of any of history’s previous monsters.
On that day, there will be a collective exhale that we haven’t experienced since the end of the Second World War.
Outside of all but a small, brainwashed faction of the population’s most cultic, human beings around the world, will break out in spontaneous celebration at the subtraction of a presence that has done incalculable damage to the course of humanity.
On that day, the messiah of the miserable will no longer be able to generate new nightmares for the rest of us. We will finally be freed from his nonsensical ramblings. He will be unable to pervert the truth, or bastardize the office, or stoke division, or murder the English language.
But I’m not foolish enough to believe that this will be the end of the nightmare.
His enablers will remain; those opportunistic, bottom-feeding hate-mongers, soul-auctioning political traitors, and armageddon-welcoming religious zealots will still all be here, rushing to fill the power chasm he will leave behind. They will devour one another trying to occupy the throne once it is empty.
And not only them, but the legion of his civilian foot soldiers, who carried him upon their shoulders.
These past 10 years have done irreparable harm to the sovereignty of our nation, to our systems of governance, to the relational connections between us, to the collective health of the planet.
But he hasn’t done this.
The people we share this country with have done it using him as their weapon of choice. Our family members. Our friends. Our co-workers. Our neighbors.
His departure will do nothing to undo all the evil that his now bruised hands have wrought, to erase every vile thing his presence has exposed as he ascended politically.
It will not rewind the years of those who lived in squalor and poverty in New York City, on whose backs he built his fraudulent, hollow empire.
His death will not bring financial restitution to the thousands of workers and contractors left abandoned by the many bankruptcies that emancipated him from responsibility.
It won’t give back wholeness and healing to the girls and women he violated in secret or maligned in public.
It will not reverse the irreparable damage he has done to a political party whose members individually and collectively abandoned every legal and moral expectation to fall prostrate before him.
It will not illicit repentance in a white Evangelical Church that parted ways with the compassionate, loving namesake of its faith tradition and fashioned a vicious, sneering, profane, God-mocking idol out of his antithesis and bowed down before it.
His passing now could not allow us to unsee the repugnant grievance cult he unleashed here; the historically hateful movement of miserable people who’ve spent the last decade reveling in an unrepentant ugliness because he gave them consent.
It will not remove the legion of incompetent, predatory, corrupt sycophants he poisoned our government with; people who have and will continue to dismantle and pervert our systems of care and legal oversight.
And his death, as much as it would feel like an initial reprieve from the chaos he has engineered and the suffering he has spearheaded, would do nothing to conceal the heart maladies he exposed within the people around us: the long-simmering racism, the scalding contempt for foreigners, the phobic hatred of human beings for their gender identity or sexual orientation.
Long after he has made his exit, we will be left with what we now know about our family members and friends and neighbors; about the people in our churches, about the parents of our children’s friends; about the pillars of our communities, about those we trust to govern us, to protect and serve us.
These people and the atrocities they co-authored, sadly, will all long outlive him.
He has merely been the symptom.
The hatred in the heart of his supporters is the sickness.
Even when he’s gone, they’ll still be here.
So, any celebration will be short-lived.
“This is clearly amateur hour at the Pentagon and in the White House. And again, the price is being paid by all of us. You can also just tell from the administration’s attitude toward this war, the fact that they’re putting out videos treating this like a video game. It’s not a video game for the families of the fallen. And then, just this week, we saw campaign fundraising materials being put out, emails where the president’s committee, the president’s political operation, was raising money off of images of him at a dignified transfer. Any politician who does that has no business leading American troops in the war. If the president is willing to raise campaign funds over the bodies of America’s war dead, he is unfit to be the commander-in-chief.” ~ Pete Buttigieg, former Secretary of Transportation and future President of the United States
