POST-ELECTION PURGE

 

I’m going to get this out, and tomorrow I’m going to go back to trying to pour love and hope into my little corner of the world. Because that’s what we are supposed to be doing.

We are a people who cannot heed warning signs. Creating distortions of truth, pushing faulty theologies, and defending self-serving realities. Shakespeare may have been correct when he penned “Hell is empty because all of the devils are here.”

My particular disappointment is with those of the household of faith who refused to admit the fruit was rotten. Churches spewing nationalism instead of Christ’s clear examples. Members so emboldened by their judgment of the perceived sins of others, they could not stop themselves to love the least of these. It was a horrific display of everything Jesus said not to do. They chose political power, no matter how hate-filled the rhetoric. They sided with the Empire. A tale as old and fraught as time.

And so now I wait in the grief. Standing by the tomb that holds what was our best hope for a kinder, fairer, greener home for our grandchildren to inherit. Deception and misrepresentation are the orders of the day and they are the only offerings on the menu. I am not hungry. In fact, swallowing any of this makes me physically ill.

I am sad and I am tired. While the world looked on in horror, our country barreled headlong and willingly into the abyss with a madman at the helm because somehow an imminently qualified intelligent black woman was too threatening to the status quo. We’ve been swept up by petty indignations, fear, and conspiracy.

I feel my body bracing itself against the coming tide. The bluster and pretense of a barely-veiled evil unleashed. The swan song of our democracy. I believe eyes will eventually be opened. But vision will come too late.