“In the end, I realized the love never turned to hate. No matter how my emotions led me to feel so, I never stopped loving people. I stopped trusting them.” — Morgan Richard Olivier
It’s Saturday, my husband’s birthday, and I’m sitting here in my pajamas with my coffee and our cat, and I’m trying really hard not to fall apart.
On Tuesday, American re-elected trump as president. Despite his 39 felony convictions, despite his failings during his first term which resulted in two impeachments, despite being a rapist, despite his despicably misogynistic and racist ways, over half of the American people cast their vote for him.
My emotions overwhelm me on normal days, but right now, they’re a crashing tsunami of despair, fear, and dread, and I am trying to keep breathing while I ride them out.
This video helped me, so I thought I’d share it here.
The thing is, this election was carried on the shoulders of white Christian men and women. Eighty-one percent of all evangelical Christians voted for trump. Typing that out, my heart reacts by pounding harder. I grew up in a segregated Texas town surrounded by evangelical Christians. We attended the same Sunday school classes every weekend. We went to the same camps, the same vacation Bible schools, and yet here they are, siding with hate.
The 2016 election broke my heart. I remember the following morning, my friends calling me, sobbing because we all understood what his taking office would mean. It gave people license to openly bully us. It made our daily lives less safe.
And it was devastating. Then when Joe Biden won in 2020, trump incited an insurrection. His followers stormed the White House, destroying and vandalizing things along the way, all while the world (and us) watched in horror. They built a gallows for Vice President Mike Pence all because he wouldn’t go along with them.
Yet even still, people in America — our neighbors and coworkers, some family and friends — chose trump. They chose him.
In doing so, they have revealed that human decency, ethical responsibility, showing empathy, caring for others, being honest and accepting — all of those things their Jesus preached for us to uphold — mean nothing.
It’s an absolute betrayal.
And so what are we supposed to do now? Now that we know that when it really comes down to it, when the choice must be made, they will absolutely sacrifice their neighbors of color, the members of the LGBTQ community, their wives, daughters, sisters and nieces, all for the false promise of cheaper gas and groceries.
I was raised to put people over possessions, to value living things over money, to care for our neighbors no matter who they love or where they come from.
We attended the same church.
But then I remember… when we were children, there was a boy in our school named Brian Stringer. He was overweight, and his family was poor, and so they bullied him. Day after day, they made his life hell until 9th grade when he finally ended it and pulled the trigger.
On its own, that was a tragedy. But what haunts me to this day is how many of those people who gleefully taunted and bullied that boy went to his funeral just because it meant they got to get out of school for a day.
Here we are, 35 years later. Those people who used a classmate’s suicide as a free pass to cut class have elected trump as president. They want to take America back. They want to make it great again.
One day after the election, this happened in our hometown, on my alma mater’s campus:
Is this what they want? Do they view women as property? Do they want members of the LGBTQ community to go back into the closet? To conform to their brand of Christianity?
My privilege as a white woman once allowed me to live in a sheltered world. Despite multiple sexual assaults in my early childhood (at the hands of three separate white Christian men), I still clung to the notion that humans are basically good, that when it comes down to it, people will choose love, they will uplift a struggling neighbor, they will come together to build a better world.
Now I sit with these broken pieces, and I am forced to confront the fact that I have been catastrophically wrong about humanity. I have to acknowledge that the majority of people are selfish. They are unkind. They will step over a suffering person in the street, and they will vote for a leader who will scapegoat our neighbors to protect their supporters’ money.
The thing is, I love our hometown. I love San Marcos so much. My family is here, my alma mater, my job, my friends. I don’t want to leave, but I don’t feel safe. I am bursting with pride over my son and the person he is becoming, but I fear that talking about him too loudly will make him into a target, so I have to stifle this great joy because my priority is to keep him safe.
So where do we go from here? Do I abandon this dream of a safer, brighter world for all of humanity? Do I dress these fears in an armor of anger to protect this heart, which — despite it being broken — is still the best part of me?
The day after the election, my son called, and though he’s far younger, he possesses this wealth of well wisdom beyond his years. I asked what our plans are, and he said, “We will focus on doing what we can to keep each other safe.”
I guess it really is that simple. We won’t give up, but we won’t so easily trust. Because we know now what we’re up against. We see the leopard now, and we know it will absolutely eat our face.
The world’s a little bleaker. Our family circle is drawn a little tighter. But we will fight, and we will hope, and we will keep each other safe.