I avoided the active tallying of the vote Tuesday night. I had suspicions, but I decided to wait till it was over to look. Nothing I did, after all, could possibly change the outcome. When I woke up, in tears from a night of anxiety, I ripped off the band-aid and looked at the results. Here’s what I wrote:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I woke up crying and alone. My heart is shattered into a million pieces. How could you, white America?
I mean, practically I know how: voter suppression delivered PA and NC to the GOP, just as they planned. The gutting of the VRA paid dividends for the Roberts Court, and now… and now… and now…
Do you really hate us so much, white America? Does the burgeoning multiculturalism of this nation so frighten you that you elected a man flagrantly unsuited for the position just because he promised a return to the white supremacy of your idealized 1950s? Do you so despise the women in your life that you couldn’t stand to see one win the presidency even just once? Are you so callous as to the value of human life that you don’t care about the millions who will end up jailed or in deportation (read internment) camps, or who will be turned away as refugees, or who will be murdered by an increasingly lawless occupying military force?
I don’t know what’s next. I don’t know if there will even be a next. All I know is that this betrayal by my parents’ generation has wounded me deeply. And I don’t know how I go on from here.
Last night, fearful and alone, trying to hide from the burgeoning future I wanted desperately not to come, I found myself reading my Bible. Not the Romanist bullshit that we consider the modern Bible; I believe in the historic Jesus, specifically the pre-church teachings of the Gospel of Q. That Jesus was a revolutionary who preached nonviolent, but fierce, resistance to the corruption of the state. And even there he has a tension between the part of him which preaches nonviolent turning the other cheek to one’s enemies, and the part of him which scorned those that were unreceptive to the revolutionary message he offered.
“Enter by the narrow gate. The path that leads to destruction is wide and easy. Many follow it. But the narrow gate and hard road lead to life. Few discover it… …those who think the realm of God belong to them will be thrown out into the dark where they will cry bitter tears of regret.”
There will come a reckoning for all those Crucifictionalists who beat their Bible with one hand as they beat their neighbor with the other. These so-called Evangelicals and other right-wing Christians who wear their piety publicly as a badge of pride have forever tarnished their claim to it in their embrace of this man. But their angry sense of ownership of this nation as a Christian White Supremacist Nation fueled Trump’s victory, and it will be remembered.
Not just by me, not just by my generation, not just by my multicultural coalition of people whose interests have always been secondary to those of “real America”, but by the God they so claim to revere. They will cry bitter tears for this betrayal of God. They will one day come to regret their resentments. If not to us, as they see their neighbors dragged off under increasingly blatant circumstances, they will regret it when it comes time for God to judge.
God damn you.