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
…to perpetuate social norms and stereotypes.
