For the love of God and all that’s good and beautiful, haven’t you had enough, America?

Enough book bans,
culture wars,
bathroom bills,
family separations,
poisoned food,
renamed lakes,
unrelenting surveillance,
tax-funded genocides,
and wars of choice,

Haven’t you had enough of terrorized refugees,
billionaire techbros,
hospital room ICE raids,
protected predators,
ignored lynchings,
kleptocratic malpractice,
legislated religion,
and of being helmed by a lecherous, drug-addled, vile, barely literate serial predator and career criminal?

Haven’t you had enough of brutal assaults on the rights of women,
on immigrants,
on transgender teens,
on unarmed black men,
on affordable healthcare,
on free speech,
on our Military?

Have you had enough of relentless attacks on the poor,
on the disabled,
on the environment,
on peaceful protestors,
on the electoral process,
on the US Postal Service,
on objective truth,
on diversity as an idea?

Haven’t you had enough nonsensical conspiracies,
denials of Science,
mockery of expertise,
ignored climate change,
silencing of doctors,
stoked racism,
polluted courts?

Haven’t you had enough cruelty,
enough bigotry,
enough criminality,
enough divisiveness,
enough malevolence,
enough hatred,
enough ugliness?

Haven’t you had enough needless suffering,
enough unnecessary death,
enough Constitutional crises,
enough curated conflict,
enough manufactured emergencies,
enough presidential tweet tantrums,
enough intentional chaos?

Maybe it’s just me.

Maybe you’re fine with it all; maybe this is good enough for you; maybe you’ve resigned yourself to this dystopian white nationalist fever dream as inevitable. I sure as hell haven’t.

I’ve had enough of this frenetic circus of sociopathy over the past ten years to last a thousand lifetimes. I’m sick to my stomach of the nation we are, and I’m in-the-marrow-of-my-bones tired of being embarrassed of and grieving over the place I call home.

I want something better.

I want equity pursued.
I want bigotry shouted down.
I want justice escorted in.
I want compassion to trend.
I want kindness to go viral.
I want diversity to be celebrated.
I want the poor, tired, huddled masses to breathe again here.
I want ceremonial American “greatness” to give way to actual common goodness.
I want to stop being at the mercy of sadistic, hateful human beings who have contempt for everything and everyone.

What the hell do you want for this place, and are you willing to do whatever is necessary to get it?

November is coming, and there’s no way to overstate the reality that this is the last stand for all of it, for all of us. What we do over the coming weeks will initiate our rebirth or write our epitaph as a Republic.

You and I have this moment to end what we’ve had enough of and to usher in what we want to see more of; to demand what we cannot live without and to condemn what we will not abide.
We have this moment to create a home for ourselves and our children, and for other people’s children, for everyone who lives here and for all those who dream of living here.
We have this moment to leave something for the vast multitude on the horizon of history who will inherit this place; this moment, between the America that is and the America that could be—and for better or for worse, will be.

And it is all in our hands.

Regardless of their gerrymandering and suppression and intimidation and lawlessness, We The Pissed-Off People can wield our numbers to defy and defeat them. 

We simply have to decide to put aside our purity tests and our excuses and our infighting and our minor differences and our apathy, and do the damn work together instead of bickering, complaining, and distracting ourselves into fascism.

No politician is likely to move people who are still inexplicably undecided; those still stuck in laziness, hopelessness, or ignorance; those who still aren’t planning to use their voices.

Only you can do that.

Only you can reach people in the trenches of your relationships with them: in your home and your neighborhood and at your school and at work and on your timelines. You can be the difference in the day.

What have you had enough of over the last ten exhausting, disorienting, heartbreaking years?
What do you want to leave for those who will follow us?
What will you do in the coming days in response?

America is not in the hands of a politician or a preacher or an athlete or a celebrity; it’s in our hands. Yes, it’s true, no one is coming to save us. The only question left is, will we save ourselves?

In the weeks ahead, may you leverage your voice, your time, your resources, your circle of influence, your network, and your community, and may you do all you can to transform the America that is into the America that could be.

This will be the dawn or the death of the nation we dream of making.

In November, may we wake up in that hopeful, beautiful, glorious place of possibility again.

I have had enough of this divided, corrosive, violent, failing America.

Have you?

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Ignorance is not a compelling argument at this point.

We’ve all heard the theories for the last ten years: people still supporting Donald Trump are unwitting victims of the partisan media and Evangelical alternate reality that they’ve been raised in and are still captives of. They’re continually surrounded
by fake news and endless conspiracy, and so they aren’t bad people; they just aren’t seeing what we are seeing, and we need all to be more understanding.

We’re a decade into this madness. This just isn’t acceptable anymore.

There isn’t a sufficient excuse for being an adult so sheltered from facts and so truth-deprived that you can’t see Trump’s complete sociopathy and you can’t discern the existential threat he and his party are to this nation.

His supporters aren’t being asked to dig beneath some complex, brilliantly crafted ruse perpetrated by Conservative media and religious conglomerates working in concert. If you can read Trump’s own social media feed or listen to the bile he spews in front of the cameras at female reporters and political opponents, and not be fully disgusted to the point of vomiting, you aren’t a reasonable human being. Either that, or you are willingly choosing to engage in wild intellectual and theological gymnastics to avoid a reality that makes you uncomfortable, intentionally avoiding some really vile stuff that he and his collaborators aren’t even attempting to conceal anymore.

I’m fully convinced that nearly everyone still supporting Donald Trump knows he is a reprehensible human being and guilty of high crimes against this nation, but they simply can’t admit to themselves or anyone else they made a mistake, and so they are doubling down again and again.

They’re not stupid; they’re just willing to let America die on the altar of their pride, which may be far worse.

Being an adult means being responsible for ferreting out what is real and what isn’t, and for making good decisions with the available information. This is what we demand from our children, isn’t it? We only let their ignorance be an excuse for so long, and then we remove that option because we expect them to be smarter than that at some point. And if we realize that they are smart enough to know better, then it becomes an indictment of their character.

If grown men and women aren’t willing or able to sift information and choose wisely because of their media choices or their circle of friends or their mental effort, the
net result is the same: they are enabling and protecting reprehensible behavior that places people in great danger.

If Fox News creates your reality, you’re going to be hateful toward lots of people. You’re going to be afraid of Muslims, LGBTQ people, immigrants, people of color, refugees—and on and on and on. And if you’ve been on the planet for a few decades, you should have developed the critical thinking not to allow a network that brokers in fantasy and fiction to be your baseline for truth. That’s a youproblem.

If The Religious Right defines for you what it means to be a Christian, your Christianity is going to look nothing like the actual teachings of Christ. It’s going to be an angry, violent thing devoid of compassion and gentleness. That isn’t your preacher’s fault, and it isn’t Franklin Graham’s fault, and it isn’t the Devil’s fault. As a thinking Christian who supposedly reads the words of Jesus and reflects on them regularly—you should see through this sham in a hot minute and soundly reject it.

If the brazen, unapologetic racism and xenophobia and misogyny on display right now is too subtle for your sensibilities, and if Nazis marching through town squares, supremacist politicians, and election interference fall beneath your radar, you either intentionally have your head in the sand or it isn’t on straight to begin with—and either is a problem.

Many of my white Evangelical friends supporting Trump aren’t as much stupid or unaware as they are cowardly. They held their noses in 2016, voted in anger or haste or error, and then quickly got out of the politics business, choosing to escape the consequences of their decision on other people. So Newsmax and the Conservative Christian Church have become convenient places of sanctuary for people with privilege wanting to hide from the results of their vote.

Again, they aren’t ignorant of reality; they just are opting out of it altogether. If it is stupidity, the affliction is highly selective, extremely localized, and very convenient. And if that’s the case, are we supposed to expect in year eleven or twelve they’re going finally have a magical epiphany and part with him?

It’s time we stopped giving adult human beings the benefit of the doubt, simply because we think they’re not smart enough not to be fooled by religious shysters, fake news peddlers, and political snake oil salesmen. If that is true, then they’re also not smart or mentally available enough to be presented with objective data or compelling arguments and to filter them responsibly. They are, practically speaking, unreachable with rational measures.

I’m tired of having to treat people like children when they aren’t capable or willing to see what even a child can see, what my children can see. They know hatred and bullying without needing to read a think piece or do online research or unpack layers of religion and history.

I’m over justifying bigotry and racism and the horrible stuff happening in the country, and giving people who perpetuate it a pass because they supposedly don’t realize they’re supporting a monster—when most of the watching world seems to get it.

In a time when information is available at our fingertips and when conversation and study and exploration are limitless, I’m through excusing supposed adults for not being able to make a decision that is based in reality, simply because they’re in some hateful, self-righteous, nationalistic bubble. That’s their fault, not ours.

I don’t hate these people, but I’m also not going to coddle them and encourage their ignorance anymore because lots of people are damaged when that happens.

Sooner or later we adults all have to own our supposed stupidity–and choose to be wiser

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A full decade into one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history, white people in this country need to be honest about something: White Christians ruined everything.

Over the last ten years, self-identified followers of Jesus have almost singlehandedly destroyed all that was good and decent and beautiful in America by hitching themselves to a monster and refusing to let go, no matter how unrepentantly evil he has proven himself to be. 

I mean, think about it:

If not for them, his vile Access Hollywood video confession of assault is a deal breaker in 2016.
If not for them, his ridiculing of a disabled reporter is a bridge too far.
If not for them, he isn’t declared a Christian.
If not for them, he isn’t elected or reelected.
If not for them, there are no stomach-turning photo ops of opportunistic religious sycophants laying hands on him.
If not for them, thousands of kids aren’t separated from their families and treated like animals.
If not for them, no one breaches the Capitol on January 6th and throws our electoral process into chaos.

We are living in a completely different timeline, now, because of them.

If not for white, alleged Christians in our government, sick people aren’t creating GoFundMe pages to get routine medical care,
our elections aren’t polluted by techbro oligarchs.
women aren’t losing their fundamental liberties,
and ICE isn’t murdering people in cold blood and without accountability.

If not for White Evangelicals, his unhinged, racist vanity rallies are empty.
If not for them, climate change isn’t dismissed, science isn’t opposed, expertise isn’t mocked, and sound medicine isn’t disregarded,
If not for them, gun violence victims get more than #thoughtsandprayers platitudes.
If not for them, every pedophile and rapist in the Epstein Files is facing a legal reckoning right now.
If not for these Christians, MAGA is the extremist fringe movement it should always have been.

Talk about losing the plot. Talk about mission drift. Talk about gaining the world and losing your soul. Talk about effing everything up for this human garbage… for nothing.

If not for the professed followers of Jesus, throughout this country, bigots aren’t emboldened to proudly parade their hatred in the light of day.
Sexual assault survivors aren’t belittled and traumatized anew.
Every one of his lies is named and condemned.
He is held accountable for his crimes and his immorality and his trampling of the Constitution.
If not for them, this planet is safer, more compassionate, and more just—period.

As a white person who grew up in the Church and pastored for decades, that’s a tough pill to force down.

Ironically, despite all their sanctimonious sermonizing, finger-wagging condemnation, and sky-is-falling histrionics, the white Evangelical Church has enabled, nurtured, and championed more inequity and more misery in these days than any other entity, and there is no close second.

For the disparate masses of the world, American Christians have become a barrier to belonging, a sanctuary for supremacy, and a hostile presence for the least of these.
By its marriage to a politics of exclusion, the Conservative Church has failed the poor, women, people of color, gender fluid human beings, and non-heteronormative people.
It’s failed immigrants and refugees and foreigners; vulnerable and marginalized communities; non-religious and non-Christians.
It has failed everyone outside the tiny gated community of the white and the wealthy.
This is indeed a tragedy.

But more than anyone, the White Evangelical Church has failed Jesus.

They have misappropriated his likeness, hijacked his name, and weaponized his message into something grotesque and oppressive—and it is rightfully repelling good people.

As someone still aspiring to a life of faith and still trying to speak into my religious tradition, it’s sobering to admit that we’re not here as a nation in this brutal battle for our existential life, we’re not at the precipice of authoritarianism, and we’re not steeped in this unapologetic supremacy, if not for people claiming to be devoted to the same Jesus I’ve grown up trying to emulate.

There are tens of millions of white people here, both Christian and non-Christian, who wake up every day working to be agents of kindness and generosity in this world, who are driven to sickness by the irreparable harm being done to this nation, to humanity, to the planet in the name of God. 

And we, not people of color, not immigrants, we white people, are going to need to be the ones to make our presence felt in our neighborhoods, on social media, in school board meetings, and at the polls, and drive these charlatans and frauds out of power and influence, and into the places of irrelevance and shame they so richly deserve.

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So, this is what it’s like to feel normal.

As I sat in a small cafe overlooking a sun-dappled Florentine piazza, that thought floated in with the evening breeze, bringing a protracted exhale that surprised me, as if I’d suddenly remembered how to breathe again.

It had taken me nearly five full days away from America to begin to realize how very unwell I’d been, how physically and emotionally depleted the past eighteen months had left me, and most alarming of all—how normal that exhaustion had become. It was as if someone interrupted the ubiquitous chaos I’d grown accustomed to and softly said, “Yeah, you don’t have to live like that.”

Little by little, with 4,500 miles and nearly a week now separating me from my beleagured home, all my recent symptoms had suddenly become clear: the jagged irritability bubbling always beneath the surface, the ever-present knot in the pit of my stomach, the low-grade dread hovering in the periphery of my thoughts, the pervasive hopelessness I’d gotten used to, the slow but certain attrition to my joy that no longer alarmed me. 

Leaving America showed me how sick America has made me.

But it wasn’t just the change of scenery that had revealed the maladies afflicting me, afflicting us; it was the dozens of human beings I’d shared conversations with, people who reminded me that there are other ways to exist that I’d forgotten about. 

Everywhere I went, shop owners, servers, Uber drivers, and other travelers from the disparate corners of this planet routinely verified how abnormal our daily life actually is:

Not everyone wakes up each day feeling they need to marshal every available resource to protect themselves from their elected officials. 

Not everyone fears a routine surgery will bankrupt them.

Not everyone has masked, Government-funded goons murdering innocent people in their streets. 

Not everyone has a career criminal and serial predator as a Head of State. 

Not everyone is helmed by theocratic, conspiratorial Christian zealots.

Not everyone is watching every fundamental liberty evaporating.

Not everyone is feeling as though their nation’s best days are behind them.

And honestly, that all felt a bit shocking.

That’s how insidious the sickness of living in this iteration of America is, how commonplace the brutality now is, how the monstrous now seems normal. We have been immersed for so long in a state of sustained urgency and unrelenting suffering that it no longer occurs to us that these are not the default settings of a civilized nation, that we are not supposed to be this deprived of optimism. We are gradually becoming acclimated to nightmarish realities that no decent human beings should ever make peace with.

My profound privilege is not lost on me. I know that many people here don’t have the good fortune of a respite from the horrors for 10 minutes, let alone 10 days. Most Americans can’t place geographic space between themselves and this country and have the precious white space of mental rest it yields, yet that doesn’t make the reckoning of the toll this place has taken on me, on all of us, any easier to accept. 

I’m now back in the country I call home, and I’m trying like hell not to forget what I learned while I was away; the terrible afflictions that come from living here inside this unfettered epidemic of corruption and hatred. I want to remember how heartsick I’ve been, so that I can keep from sliding further into the abyss, so that I do not allow America to render me devoid of joy or bereft of hope.

If there’s anything I can give you as a memento of my travels, it’s confirmation that none of this is normal, that we deserve something more than this dystopian bigot fever dream we’ve grown ever more comfortable with, that this leaden nihilism does not have to be our destiny, unless we allow it to be.

Maybe you’ve started to accept the unacceptable, maybe you’ve been emotionally numbed by the unrelenting atrocities, or maybe you’ve grown so weary from fighting that you’ve stopped remembering what it’s like to breathe. If so, may you be reminded that these are symptoms of illness, but they do not need to be a death sentence.

The only way we can help retain our sanity and stay tethered to our humanity is to not succumb to the sickness surrounding us, to not let this parasitic regime destroy us, to refuse to be swallowed up by the cancer of cruelty our leadership has released into our bloodstream.

To every American who is being sickened by America: take heart, keep going. We can get well together. We will.

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A wise man once sang:

Come gather ‘round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
– Bob Dylan

Of course, he was right. The times are always a changin’: all things forever shifting, everything always in flux.

And right now, that perpetual change feels particularly terrifying and disorienting, as we find ourselves dealing with a never-ending tsunami of Constitutional crises, leadership failures, manufactured emergencies, curated conspiracies, human rights atrocities, and natural disasters.

But perhaps more than all of that, we are surrounded by what feels like a collective shift in the humanity around us; people who seem to be either turning away from the suffering around them, have grown ambivalent toward it, or worse, experience a perverse joy about it. It is the rising inhumanity we are seeing that is leaving us exhausted.

So, with all that worrisome shifting we’re immersed in, where can we find peace, where does stability come, what can we really hold on to? How do we stay human in times when inhumanity feels overwhelming?

We choose to do the work that only we can do, and the only work that we can do: we embody our values within our choices.

What would you say are some of the highest human attributes or qualities? Compassion? Kindness? Generosity? Courage? The good news is, nothing is preventing you from attaining such things. No politician can prevent it. No regime can hinder you. No hateful human being can keep you from being whoever you decide to be.

We stay human right now by staying within the space of our agency, by deciding over and over again who we choose to be.

We stay human by fighting the inhumanity within ourselves; by making decisions that center compassion, that override selfishness, that show bravery, that reflect whoever it is we aspire to be.

We ask ourselves what kind of person the world needs right now, and do our best to be that kind of person.

That helps us stay sane within the turbulence of change:

The human being you are in favorable circumstances is the human being you can be in disastrous ones.

The human being you are in a fully functioning Republic is the human being you can be in one that is failing.

The human being you are when responsible leaders are in power is the human being you can be when your leaders are malignant narcissists.

The human being you are when people around you seem decent and loving is the human being you can be when surrounded by people who seem to have lost the plot.

The human being you are when everyone around you believes what you believe is the human being you can be when no one around you believes what you believe.

You have the capacity to be constant when the environment you find yourself in is changing.

Shift happens, friend.

The times they are a changin’, but you can choose not to let the times change you.

Be encouraged.

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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?

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To Our Loved Ones,

To Our Grandparents, Parents, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins, and Older Siblings,

We’re aware of what you think of us, either because you’ve told us during explosive, room-clearing conversations, over terse Cold War text exchanges, or in second-hand words passed through the people who now serve as the sole intermediaries between us.

You believe that we’re lost.

You believe we’ve changed.

You think we’ve become radicalized.

You think we’ve abandoned our faith, our families, and our nation, and you’re disappointed with us.

And we need you to know that you’re largely responsible.

Much of this is your fault.

You say that we’ve changed, and we have: we’ve become the people you taught us to become when we were growing up.

people who are deeply offended by inequity,

people who look out for the underdog,

people who grieve the suffering of others,

people who find the beauty in the diversity around us,

people who want others to have enough,

people who are aware of how fortunate we are to live here,

people trying to love our neighbors as ourselves,

people who detest liars, predators, and con men,

people who abhor bullies and bigots and braggarts,

And the people that we’ve become, in large part because of the wisdom and compassion you poured into us as children, can’t fathom, as adults, how you’ve voted for Donald Trump three times and how you still support him now.

It would have been unthinkable to those younger versions of us (and the younger version of you, for that matter), that you would have embraced this man: his cruelty, his depravity, his petty, vengeful, unloving heart.

That’s not the way you raised us, and so whatever issues you have with us now, you need to understand:

You made us this way.

You have radicalized us into loving, compassionate human beings, and we can’t fathom how that can be a problem for you.

We’re really proud of the people we are today, and grateful for the time you spent with us; the lessons you taught us about seeing all people as inherently valuable,

about being a person of your word,

about telling the truth even when it’s costly,

about admitting your mistakes,

about taking responsibility for your actions,

about valuing people over money,

about how we treat people, being what defines us,

We were paying attention in history class.

We were paying attention in Sunday School.

We were paying attention around the dinner table.

We were listening.

We believed you.

We did what you told us to do and became who you told us to become—and so now we care about the world, and we despise evil, and we live open-hearted and open-handed.

And that’s why we’ve found ourselves standing here wondering how you’ve become people we no longer recognize, how you’ve embraced the embodiment of the ugliness you warned us to avoid, how you stopped taking your own advice somewhere along the way.

You say that you only support the party or the policies and not the man—but we remember you telling us that we are known by the company we keep, that the ends don’t always justify the means, and that we can’t gain the world (or a Supreme Court seat) and lose our souls. Back then, you wouldn’t have tolerated those flimsy excuses for aligning with someone horrible, and we won’t tolerate them from you now.

As children, we looked up to you, and that part of us will continue to love you dearly and be grateful to you.

But as adults, we now see you eye to eye, and we grieve the loss of the people we imagined you were when you were teaching us how to be good human beings.

By continuing to support this man, you have gone against everything you told us was important growing up: decency, honesty, fairness, maturity, and empathy.

Either you were lying then, or you’re wrong now.

Which one is it?

The children we were and the adults we’ve become both want to know.

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In those internal autobiographies, we all tell ourselves that we’re one of the good ones, that our presence on this planet is yielding something beautiful, something that will leave this place better than when we arrived. In those stories, we are the heroes, the helpers, the saviors, or at the very least, we’re decent people just doing our best.

That self-reverential story has a way of bleeding over into the place we call home, the nation we claim as our own. There is a poisonous exceptionalism that most of us were born into; a curated mythology inherited by our parents, our politicians, our pastors that convinced us that as a collective, we were good or godly.

Some of us live our entire lives believing we’re better than we are, that our nation is better than it is, until we are faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Suddenly, we realize that we might be the villains, the terrorists, the monsters, the accomplices.

We all grew up in this country learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, reading stories of Hitler’s unthinkable brutality against the Jewish people. We stared in disbelief at the images of walking corpses, emancipated from the concentration camps at the very precipice of death. We nearly vomited seeing jittery black and white newsreels of naked, indistinguishable human beings, stacked like cord wood. We read of an unrelenting barbarism against an entire group of human beings, whose only crime was existing in their skin.

And when faced with this sprawling inhumanity that defied our ability to hold it all, invariably we all thought about the German people, and we all asked ourselves, “What kind of human beings would allow this?”

We wondered what kind of morally broken people could stand by and watch generations of mothers, fathers, and children eradicated from existence, their communities razed to rubble, their cultures erased, their very humanity discarded.

From the safety of hindsight and the buffers of our own false stories, we’ve interrogated ordinary Germans from eighty years ago, lamenting their silence and inaction in the face of such horrors; condemning them as, at best, gutless cowards, and at worst, willing collaborators.

With stratospheric arrogance, we’ve told ourselves that we’d never have consented to such evil, that we’d have pushed back against it, that the abject terror unleashed on the Jewish people would never have happened on our watch.

And yet, there is Gaza.

Day after day, she testifies against us, documenting our indifference, recording our apathy, inventorying our inaction. She lifts our hands in front of us and shows us that her blood is all over them. She burns up the fictions of our goodness. She reminds us how easy it is for a nation to abandon its humanity, silence by silence, justification by justification, averted eye by averted eye.

Gaza is indicting the American people, and Iran and Lebanon are joining her. They are holding a mirror up to us as a nation, revealing exactly who we are— the truth about what we believe, about what we will abide, and what we will not stand for— and we should be ashamed and driven to our knees in repentance.

It would be damning enough to declare that many Americans now are as reprehensible as many Germans in the 1940s, but that wouldn’t be accurate; we are far worse.

We have access to America’s and Israel’s every vile deed in the palm of our hands. Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sociopathy floods our timelines. With the swipe of a finger, we can traverse thousands of miles and see the annihilation of a people in real-time. Unlike the German people in the shadow of Hitler, we cannot even attempt to plead ignorance. Through tiny screens that we are rarely more than inches from, we are 24-7 bystanders to the slaughter of children, to the bombing of hospitals, to the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people. We know exactly where the money is going, the politicians whose empires have been funded by terrorism, and the scale of the mass murders our tax dollars are funding.

And we are culpable for all that we allow or refuse to oppose.

One day, eighty years from now, generations of children all over the world will ask what kind of people would have allowed the genocide in Gaza to happen.

And it should break our hearts and boil our blood to know that unless we alter our course immediately and fiercely, we will be that kind.

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Life is exhausting these days for lots of us, and I think I’ve figured out why. I think it’s having to sit through the pretending.

You see, it’s bad enough watching over a third of our nation becoming fully indoctrinated into a sycophantic cult of personality of the very worst kind of person, to see once reasonable people abandon any semblance of benevolence toward diverse humanity.

It’s rightly heartbreaking to see those we love so seduced by power, addled by racism, and deluded by tribalism that they’ve declared war on immigrants and, vaccines and gay kids and the electoral process.

And yes, it’s infuriating witnessing tens of millions of Americans having their minds slowly poisoned by Fox News and Franklin Graham to the point they defend a domestic act of terror on our Capitol or take the side of a murderous regime’s genocide or celebrate their neighbors being thrown into concentration camps.

As wearying as all that is, it’s so much worse having them invoke love of God and country in the process.

That’s what makes these days so difficult for so many of us: not merely coming to terms with the beliefs and prejudices and phobias of those we are daily surrounded by here, but having to contend with their constant projection about us and their refusal to simply own who they are. It’s the nonstop, hypocritical, farcical performance art.

Good people are so tired of traitors masquerading as patriots, of the treasonous continually waving the flag, of hateful people peddling a God of love.

They’re tired of human beings with no empathy pretending they care about the sanctity of life, of the loudest prophets of America First having the least regard for so many Americans, of the self-righteous sermonizers defending a predator.

Where are the selflessness, generosity, and hospitality that were supposed to mark the lovers of God and country?

Where are the lives that replicate the embrace of the poor, huddled masses affixed to the foundation of Liberty?

Where are those who emulate the love of disparate neighbors at the heart of the Gospels?

Patriot. Christian. American.

These words have all lost their meaning: words that used to cost something to claim, labels that once came with even a modicum of transformation, and self-identifiers that had previously required a measure of evidence displayed in one’s life.

The flag and the cross that used to hold such meaning to so many of us are now just stolen iconography wielded by the immigrant-hating wall-builders and the violent anti-abortion zealots.

Using these words and wearing these symbols has become more and more difficult for us, as they now align us with the very antithesis of our moral convictions and guiding principles.

People who truly love this country, those who earnestly seek a faith expressed in love, human beings who are burdened to make America worthy of the speeches and anthems—we find ourselves branded heretics and traitors and apostates, forcefully displaced from religion and country by these angry squatters who have taken up residence in them.

True patriots should want all Americans to vote, they should oppose would-be dictators, they should yield to the Constitution, and they should demand a nation that is offered to everyone equally.

Actual followers of Jesus should defend the vulnerable, they should give comfort to the sick, food to the hungry, welcome to the immigrant, and love to the least among us.

And while the masqueraders and pretenders parade around in grand performative acts of love of God and country while willfully betraying both—the rest of us are going to have to fight to hold on to our nation and our religion, and to care for a world that needs desperately authentic people of faith, morality, and conscience who simply live a love that doesn’t need to declare itself loving.

As far as patriotism and faith go, this nation needs the real thing again.

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(Warning: this article contains depictions of sexual violence and may be triggering for survivors of assault)

Donald Trump is a court-adjudicated rapist.

This is not speculation.

It is not conjecture.

It’s not a Left-Wing talking point.

This is documented, established fact.

It was unequivocally declared by a judge.

It has been repeatedly upheld in the courts.

He is a rapist.

And to any decent human being, that would have been a dealbreaker.

It wasn’t for them.

Donald Trump’s name is listed tens of thousands of times in the files documenting one of the most prolific and vile child trafficking rings in history, orchestrated by a man with whom he was a close friend and collaborator, one he traveled with. partied with, and corresponded with.

For people with normal ethical standards, this would be a stark, uncrossable red line.

For them, it proved not to be.

Donald Trump has been accused by dozens of women of rape, sexual abuse, and physical violence, including a woman who testified before the FBI that Trump raped her when she was just 13 years old.

For actual followers of Jesus, this would all be stomach-turning and condemned as the darkest kind of evil.

For them, it hasn’t been.

For tens of millions of our family members, lifelong friends, neighbors, coworkers, and classmates, none of this has mattered. His well-documented brutality has never been a liability.

Despite a vast and reprehensible body of work, filled with proven sexual assault, alleged pedophilia, boasts about forced affection, credible accusations, and vicious public verbal attacks on women, he still receives their undying allegiance.

Instead of joining decent humanity in dragging him and his accomplices into the raking light of legal accountability for their atrocities against the most vulnerable, they obfuscate, they feign ignorance, they move the goalposts, and they slander the victims.

For all their performative sermonizing about protecting girls and young women, Trump’s supporters have shown through their silence, through their refusal to acknowledge reality, and through their steadfast adoration no matter how disgusting the revelations that they simply don’t give a damn.

Unthinkable violence against children, sadistic degradation of women, absolutely monstrous allegations of assault; they’re all trumped by the pathetic cultic affection they have for a man who in any other sphere of life would be a pariah where good people gather.

They have put political wins, Supreme Court Seats, and the cheap high they get off hurting people vicariously through him above the dignity and safety of other human beings. In the face of legal reckoning, he has received the protection of the highest seat of power in this nation, one they’ve helped him retain.

They know what he’s done, and it has not dampened their passion.

And this, perhaps as much as any moral or ethical malpractice they’ve engaged in to support him (and there has been so much), cannot be something we let them off the hook for, no matter what they say after he is no longer in power or no longer walking this earth.

When time and justice catch up to him, when his regime is finally dismantled, and some kind of normalcy and stability return to our nation, their breathless worship of a violent, sadistic sexual deviant will be their legacy.

He is who he is, and his supporters are who they are.

Donald Trump is a rapist.

He will always be a rapist.

His supporters will always have passionately supported a rapist.

They cannot be excused for that.

They cannot be forgiven for that.

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What in the white trash hell is happening here?

How did we get here?

I’m not talking about the perfect storm of corruption, toxic religion, and white nationalism that has resulted in the unthinkable ascension to power of one of the most reprehensible, festering sacks of organic matter to ever leave his putrid slime trails on the planet.

Greater minds can unpack the complex historical and social explanations for the inexplicable sequel given to the greatest single collective electoral error in our history.

What I want to know is how, at the precipice of our two hundred and fiftieth year as a Republic, have we devolved into the disgraceful public urination that took place at our nation’s Capitol.

If you took every stereotype of the ugly American, the most monstrously exaggerated caricatures of we as a people, the absolute worst clichés of this nation at our most base, most ignorant, and most vile, and you fed it into an AI program with the prompt: make something disgusting—this is what you’d have ended up with.

We should be the United States of Embarrassment today. There should be nonpartisan vomiting and facepalming all across this nation after witnessing this wasteful, 60-million-dollar, star-spangled, asinine, white supremacist dudebro circle jerk on the lawn of the People’s House, our house.

Watching this garish Temu Roman Colosseum cosplay filled with grifters, predators, and criminals should infuriate every single American who has a shred of self-respect or love of country left.

In any other iteration of our country, this would not stand. Knowing that their taxes were funding an opulent, violent, phobic birthday party for a cognitively failing serial pedophile would propeled our proud and patriotic forebears into a complete overthrow of those in power.

In a time when people have to choose between paying their rent, or affording routine healthcare, when families can’t afford groceries or to fill their gas tanks, when we’re funding foreign genocides and domestic concentration camps, when we’re told we can’t afford to house or feed or care for the most vulnerable—this should make our blood boil.

More than that, it should wake us all the hell up: conservative, moderate, or liberal; Democrat, Independent, or Republican; straight or queer, well off or struggling, native born or immigrant, to the reality that we are all being played.

The billionaires (and the trillionaire) are mocking us all right now; dismantling the systems and protections designed to care for each of us, ignoring the Constitution, discarding morality, hoarding the wealth that was meant to be shared, devouring our natural resources, turning us against one another—and giving us a sweaty, bloated 60-million-dollar middle finger to us in the process.

November should be a reckoning for these narcissistic vampires once and for all, but we shouldn’t wait that long. Last night should be enough. This should be the final straw for every human being who calls this place home, rousing each of us out of whatever apathy, denial, political tribalism, wishful thinking, or American exceptionalism that has kept us on the sidelines.

The white trash, classless stupidity on the White House lawn last night was a microcosm of the prolific mockery of America that this President and his accomplices have made for ten years now.

These people believe that we’re ignorant, that we’re lazy, that we’re too distracted and soft to give a damn about the fact that they’re fleecing us, that all we need is a the easy high of fireworks and faux patriotism to lull us into inaction.

If we allow them to prevail, we’ll have proven them right.

Who are we going to be, America?

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