Sunday, June 7, 2020

Confession and Apology

At the risk of stating the obvious and in the spirit of confession, I'm just going to say this: The past 4 years or a little more have been really eye opening for me—and NOT in a good way.

It’s not that I'm surprised that Trump is a horrible President. That was crystal clear from the start (although he’s even worse in some ways than I ever imagined). And it’s not that I was SO naive that I thought there was no evil in the world or that cruelty and racism were relics of the past. I absolutely knew better than that. I was under no illusions that the world was all unicorns and rainbows. I knew there was systemic work to be done, and I tried to pay attention and keep learning and working in my own modest ways, to try to leave the world a little better than I found it. I've also tried to give others the benefit of the doubt at times, because we are all human and make mistakes...

But O.M.G.

I guess the simplest way to say it is that I knew some things were bad, but I had no clue just HOW bad until this country put Donald J. Trump in the White House. Of course, most People of Color knew all along, because they had no choice. It’s in their faces on a daily basis. But until fairly recently I still had the luxury of wishful thinking.

Well, here we are, 3 1/2 years into the presidency of a vile, utterly unqualified, narcissistic con man, and the list of growing cruelties and injustices being perpetuated in our country is too long to even keep track of, from the children in cages at our border and school shootings to the incompetent handling of the pandemic to widespread police brutality, mass incarceration, and corruption—even at the highest levels of our government.

And the thing that REALLY gets me is how many people in this country are just fine with that. In fact, they are PROUD of it.

It keeps me up at night. I will NEVER understand how—EVEN NOW— nearly half of this country justifies and even aligns itself with these atrocities.

Don’t bother to suggest to me that all this country really needs is Jesus, because it just so happens that most Trump supporters already think they've got a corner on that market, and it hasn’t helped.

I wish I had a great finish for this little rant—some magical solution or divine inspiration. But I don’t. All I can offer is a meager apology to my Black and Brown friends and neighbors for not realizing sooner what deep trouble we are in and a solemn promise to join forces with those who are determined to stop the insanity and make an effort to behave like decent human beings.

As Maya Angelou taught us, now that we know better, we need to DO better.

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