What Hurts Most

Though I am disappointed with the outcome of the election, what is bothering me most is that such a large swath of people voted for a man who is a convicted felon, guilty of sexually abusing a woman, and said to have stoked the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

That he is respected despite all of this is beyond me.

He calls himself a patriot, again despite his support of the desecration of the Capitol and his intent to overthrow the results of the election. Patriots don’t do that, do they? He says he is for law and order, though he apparently approved of his supporters striking law enforcement officers who were trying to maintain law and order on that fateful day.

He called COVID-19 a hoax, causing too many people to refuse treatment because they believed him. He stole classified documents and apparently hid them in plain sight all over his house. He had private meetings with Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office, not allowing anyone, including the press, to be present. Do patriots do that?

Colin Kaepernick was lambasted for kneeling in protest against police brutality against Black people and was not only blasted for being unpatriotic but was effectively thrown out of the National Football League.

But a convicted felon who stoked an insurrection is worthy of serving a second term as president of the United States?

I don’t understand how people cannot care about what his administration wants to do – and has outlined what they plan on doing in Project 2025 – to change this government and this country. The very things that made America the most respected democracy are being thrown out, including some of our basic freedoms. There is awareness of how dangerous it is for women of childbearing age as the government seeks to have total control over our bodies. Although he is not the only one, last week I read where Nicholas Fuentes chanted, “Your body, my choice!” to women who were standing nearby. (https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/12/business/video/hateful-rhetoric-women-your-body-my-choice-brown-intv-digvid)

How can anybody be all right with that? And how come the incoming president won’t decry it and say it isn’t an acceptable thing to day?

Empires fail. I get that. And it feels like the American Empire has been on life support for a long time. One of the dangers of being this sick is that the masses do not know what’s ahead. The people leading the movement to take the government away from the “Libs” know that people do not read or listen or analyze and compare what people in public say. They know that far too many people rely on social media and any message – true or not – that they hear they take as the truth.

That alone is troubling, but when we add that people know what this man has done and is pledging to do once he is in office but are not bothered, I shudder. We, this country, are following a path that other failing democracies took; when they realized that their beloved leader did not have their best interests at heart and in fact killed many of those who supported him, it was too late. https://medium.com/bouncin-and-behavin-blogs/people-never-thought-hitler-would-go-that-far-until-he-did-496b2db613dd)

We are in for a difficult stretch. I don’t know if he will pardon the criminals (he calls them patriots) who violently stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. I have read that he wants to put the Biden family in jail, along with Christopher Wray and others (https://www.newsweek.com/trump-picked-fbi-director-will-prosecuted-imprisoned-steve-bannon-1702432) I don’t know what the incoming president has on Wray, but what I do know is that the president-elect has been convicted of serious crimes and will likely never have to pay for it.

Half the country is all right with that, and that hurts.

The America that we have known is about to become a memory.

A candid observation…

Looking Forward to the End of eight years of political turmoil

We are eight days from the General Election, and my biggest hope is that it go off without a glitch.

But I am worried because the former president does not admit to losing anything, and if he loses this election, as he did in 2020, I am sure he is going to use his power, his money and the money of his wealthy friends, and his lies to stoke his supporters into another frenzy resulting in violence and causing confusion and doubt as to the legitimacy of the election. There will be a few more days, weeks, or moths of emotional manipulation of the American people.

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I am angry and tired. I am confused about why the election is so close, given all of the issues of the former president, including being a convicted felon and a convicted sexual offender. I am angry at America’s system of government and, frankly, stupid and worthless rules, that allow a convicted felon to run for the highest office in the land. I am angry at Merrick Garland for what feels like his lackluster responses and reactions to the crimes of the former president, allowing way too much time to pass before the former president was finally called out for his behavior and his disrespect of this country, its institutions and its laws.

I am angry that indecency and vulgarity have been accepted as normal by the media; I am angry at so-called regulatory systems that have allowed Fox News and others to continue to operate though their “talent” spews lies and in doing so, has supported the dismantling of this country. I am bothered that people giggle rather than call the former president out on his lies, name-calling, and abusive language – be it on an outdoor platform or standing in a church. (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/9/2245657/-Trump-encourages-TPUSA-crowd-to-start-curse-word-chant-in-a-church)

I am outraged that the media, for the most part, has either not been aware of or has chosen to ignore the ominous path on which the former president is taking the country. Do they not care that this country might become a Fascist nation?

I am still going through my emotions and disappointments. There is so much to sort through.

But one thing (in addition to what I have just written) I am fairly sure about is that because of the antics, the lying, and the emotional manipulation of the emotions of American citizens for eight long years, many people in this country may be suffering from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and more. It feels like there are many people who at this time may need medication or therapy because this entire Trump experience has so battered their feelings and emotions.

I find it troubling that so many Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives have been silent in public, allowing the former president to do and say whatever he has wanted. Some Republicans are speaking out now, but for eight years, they have been largely silent. There has been no harbinger of truth to bring this runaway train of bigotry, hatred, deception, and greed to a halt, as did the words of US Attorney Joseph Welch, who stopped Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954 as the senator continued his contrived attack on communism, ruining the lives of countless innocent people, as he attacked yet another person during a hearing: “Sir, at long last, have you no decency?” (https://www.scdemocratonline.com/stories/put-an-end-to-this,25068)

Where have been the lovers of democracy? Why have so many people remained silent, compliant, and complicit as the former president and his friends have systematically and intentionally worked to undo the American republic? I have little respect for those who released books after they got out of office or the employ of the Federal government about the depravity of what they experienced during the Trump presidency.

Why didn’t they say something out loud early in this circus, not because they wanted to sell a book but because they wanted to save their country?

I have not written much in the past months because I have been watching, and, unfortunately, inhaling the toxicity that has been hovering over us all. The toxicity has been caused not only by the masters of the soft coup that has continued since January 6, but also apparently inspiring millions of people to support the former president.

They are afraid of “the bad people” that their hero talks about all of the time, especially “the immigrants.” The former president’s language has always fed the fear of so many white Americans, language that has also been used by those who lead their churches. The goal of the former president and his minions has not been to save America; it has been, rather to empty the current “swamp” and fill the hole with their own ideology. Americans, mostly but not all white, have fully accepted and internalized the message that “the bad people” must be herded up and sent away for America to be “great” again.

Writing this is helping me push through my feelings which have constipated my spirit, but this unpacking is just the beginning. As I write, I feel the density of my anger and disappointment, coupled with a sense of dread about the former president and his friends will do in the aftermath of the upcoming election.

They want to end democracy and have said so.(https://newrepublic.com/post/179247/jack-posobiec-democracy-cpac-2024) Russell Vought, co-author of Project 2025, said they want to end multiculturalism. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQjdwsZhE_Q)

We are in trouble. I hope we get through this, but I hope even more that we have learned that people must work to preserve and improve what or who they say they love because there are always wolves in waiting who want to tear down those very things.

A candid observation …

Pledging Allegiance to a Flag that Has Not Pledged Allegiance to You

In 1965, author James Baldwin debated Conservative writer and political commentator William F. Buckley at Cambridge University. The event took place not long after Baldwin, residing in France, had recuperated from an illness that had sapped him of his strength, but he was well enough in February of that year to make the trip to Cambridge University and face Buckley.

The subject that they were to debate was “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” Baldwin went first, and he spoke with a quiet fire, clarity, and passion in a way that seemed to hold the roomful of students spellbound. He had no notes. He merely spoke. His words were riveting and biting at the same time; he shared the raw truth about being Black in America and that experience, in all of its fullness, did not require notes or a script to make his points.

He said many things in that speech that hit hard but his description of what it was like to grow up Black in America was particularly powerful. He said that it was a unique experience to realize as a child “that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance… has not pledged allegiance to you,” to be shocked to discover that “although you are rooting for Gary Cooper “ as he kills Indians, the Indians are you.”

I found myself wishing that I could have seen Buckley’s face as Baldwin spoke. The truth he was sharing was as raw as it was painful. Baldwin continued. “I picked the cotton …under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing!’

We can all remember saying the pledge, putting our hands over our hearts and pledging fealty to this country and therefore to its flag. I realized that in my own mind we all pledge allegiance to a country and its government that has not pledged allegiance to us. The flag is a symbol of a country whose leaders have felt little compunction over the course of its life to create policies that respect the full humanity of all who live here.

I can remember, as a child who sang in a district choir in Detroit singing “pro-America” songs. I still remember the lyrics of one:

I love the United States of America!

I love the way we all live without fear!

I like to vote for my choice, speak my mind, raise my voice

Yes, L like it here!

I like the United States of America

I am thankful each day of the year!

For I can do as I please ‘cause I’m free as the breeze,

Yes, I like it here!

I like to climb to the top of a mountain so high

Lift my head to the sky

And say how grateful am I

For the the way that I’m working, and helping and giving

And doing the things I hold dear!

Yes, I like it! I like it!
I like it here!

All of us in that integrated choir sang our hearts out – with all of our songs – but there was a special and unique energy that I can remember when we sang the songs about “our country.” We sang the songs. We pledged allegiance to the flag. And we believed that this country was a safe place that afforded liberty and justice to everyone.

I didn’t know – nor did my choirmates know – that this was a country that denied rights and equality to many who love it. I had not witnessed the evidence of racial, ethnic, class, and religious bigotry. I did not know about buses that made Black people sit in the back, neighborhoods that were manipulated to be all white or all Black, and I did not know that Black people who had served in this country’s wars did not earn a place in the line for benefits for veterans once they returned home. I had no idea that Black soldiers were too often lynched – while still in uniform – when they returned from those wars. They were fighting for their country, but it was not enough to dissolve the curse of racism that was baked into the foundation of this country.

When Baldwin said that we pledge allegiance to a flag that has “not pledged allegiance to you,” I felt myself take a small gasp. I had never thought of the plight of so many people here for whom that sentence holds true. It is such a simple truth, but we don’t often think of it that way, with those words. It is a jarring truth.

When Baldwin finished his side of the debate, the roomful of students – a group that looked to be all male and all white – stood on their feet and applauded for what seemed like 3-5 minutes. When Buckley took the podium, he opened by commenting of Baldwin’s “British accent,” suggesting that it was probably fake – but nobody responded. He made his points, not nearly as eloquent as had Baldwin, concluding, of course, that the American Dream was not created on the backs of Black people. When the camera panned to Baldwin’s face to catch his reaction, it was clear that he understood that Buckley did not have a clue as to what he had presented. Buckley received a polite round of applause when he was done – and he lost the debate: 184 votes to Baldwin’s 544.

The people who are in this moment fighting to dismantle the government are those to whom the country pledged allegiance. I don’t understand how one can call oneself a patriot while working to take one’s country down, but I do know this: This country has never pledged allegiance to the masses of Americans who need policies that help them. It has pledged allegiance, however, to those who have money, who make money, and who will continue to make money for themselves. All who are ignored or passed over will still be expected to pledge allegiance to the country that has not and will not pledge allegiance to them. Those who have been pledged the least will be those who fight the hardest to save what rights they have; those who have never worried about having rights as American citizens will continue to bulldoze over them and not realize the truth of Fannie Lou Hamer’s words, “Until all of us are free, none of us are free.” Many people will find out the hard way that the American Dream has been created at the expense of the Negro, as Baldwin said, but at the expense of every person who has done back-breaking work of building this country.

Until All of us are free…

One of the most gripping scenes in the movie “The Color Purple,– the original and the makeover – is when Celie faces her oppressor – her husband – angry and tired at the way she has been treated for much of her life, and, while holding a knife, says to him, “Until you do right by me, everything you even think about is going to fail.” (https://fb.watch/pAS7-C4Iza/)

A sentiment attributed to having first been expressed by Emma Lazarus in 1883 and repeated by others, including Maya Angelou and Fannie Lou Hamer: “Until all of us are free, none of us are free,” carries much of the weight and meaning of Celie’s statement

These powerful words are ignored by far too many people. People who oppress others, who lord power over others instead of treating them with love and respect, will eventually always be defeated. They will feel the defeat in themselves and/or will see the defeat in the world or atmosphere they tried to create.

Creating a toxic atmosphere is apparently not that difficult; we have seen cults form and grow under talented and bigoted leaders throughout history.

But they cannot last – because the human quest for dignity, freedom, equality, and equity is ultimately stronger than the faux strength projected and practiced by those who think more highly of themselves than they ought.

I keep listening to and reading people say that they want the former president to be re-elected because they like his policies. I don’t know all of the policies they’re talking about, but some sources break them down. (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/18/trump-presidency-administration-biggest-impact-policy-analysis-451479)

But the policies people like that seem to be resonating most strongly are those that denounce the idea that all people are created equal, endowed with “certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” People love that the former president vows to either deport or detain immigrants. (https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/11/politics/trump-stephen-miller-immigration-detention-deportation/index.html)

I am presuming that policies they love also include refusing federal funds that would be used to help feed poor children. (https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/summer-ebt-republicans-child-poverty-b2477996.html) (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/us/school-lunches-assistance-republicans.html)

The policies they like, again I’m presuming, include watching people drown at the border while at the same time refusing federal funds that would help give border policy the resources it needs. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/3-migrants-drown-near-shelby-park-eagle-pass-texas-soldiers-denied-entry-federal-border-agents/)

They are overjoyed that Roe v Wade was overturned, and like policies that make it a crime for a woman to have an abortion – even if that abortion comes as the result of a naturally-occurring miscarriage. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-increasing-risk-of-criminal-charges-for-women-who-experience-a-miscarriage), or because of being raped.

These culture-war policies that so many people like are abusive; America is in an abusive relationship with its own government. It is inconceivable to me how anyone who calls him or herself “Christian” can be okay with the rights of so many people being ignored and trampled upon.

I keep asking what happens to us – the people – if these people get more power. What will happen to old people if Medicare and Social Security end? What will happen to poor children who will not be able to eat without the funding allotted to states for them to have food over the summer? What will happen to immigrants if they are forced into internment camps? What will happen to the small amount of justice Black and Brown people, the poor, women, and other non-white, non-cis-gender individuals receive?

Those who are abused will take it for so long – and then they will rise up. Those who want this to be a Fascist country are not thinking about how a government like that will affect everyone – including them – and their lack of understanding and insight will be their loss. But people will only take abuse for so long before they rebel. The human spirit longs for and demands to be free. The ways of the past as concerns Black people are not something we will ever adhere to again. We will not be forced to look down when we pass by a white person. We will not be silent when we are being cheated of our economic earnings. We will not be silent when the justice system refuses to give us justice. We have “been there, done that,” and the people who want us to go back will learn that their desire is untenable and unrealistic.

On this Martin Luther King Day, we will hear over and over excerpts from his “I Have a Dream Speech.” The most rabid racists will quote the one line he said in that speech that fits into their white supremacist ideology – that he dreams of a day when his children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

They will lift those words as some sort of justification for their being against civil and human rights for all people, including Black people. They will nod their heads at his words as support of their belief that there is too much attention paid to racism – while they continue to exploit Black people based on the color of their skin. They will use those words to bypass the rancid racism that makes them say that some people are presidents of prestigious universities or justices/judges in America’s justice system, or some students are in colleges, only because of Affirmative Action and the color of their skin.

They will ignore the fact that many white people are in positions and are in colleges – because of the color of their skin.

In using those words, they will conveniently forget how they have tortured, beaten, and robbed Black people just because they could. They will forget how they destroyed Rosewood and got away with it, how they destroyed the Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. They will call you “woke” if you remind them of the coup that took place in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 because white people decided that they would not allow Black people to “rule over them.” They will ignore the atrocities they have committed and continue to commit on and against Black people – just because they are Black and have been characterized by a narrative that can only be called “fake.”

Dr. Martin Luther King said a lot of things that most people do not know – and don’t want to know. Among the things he said was that white people “made God a partner in their exploitation of the Negro.” (Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, p. 79) Many who call on the name of Jesus in their claim to be Christian believe that Jesus was a white man. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/06/25/how-an-iconic-painting-jesus-white-man-was-distributed-around-world/) (https://voices.uchicago.edu/religionculture/2017/06/26/the-klan-white-christianity-and-the-past-and-present-a-response-to-kelly-j-baker-by-randall-j-stephens/)

White smugness that their adherence to white supremacy cements and justifies their hatred, violence, and injustice for African Americans fuels their arrogance and power; like abusive husbands who use the precepts of male superiority to justify the beating and sometimes murdering of their wives, believers in white supremacy lord their power over people whom they think of as being less than human, and therefore, less deserving of being treated with fairness and dignity.

But they forget that the abused and oppressed will one day rise up. They will fight for their dignity, even if it means they might die in the process. Humans were made to be free.

And the words I think of, when I think of the state in which this country sits, are those uttered by a tired but empowered Celie, who tells her abuser that the abuse is over: “Until you do right by me, everything you even think about gonna (sic) fail.

A candid observation.

Humans in the Hands of a Silent God

Any more, as I hear about the bad and violent actions people take against other people, I shudder.

I held onto a naivete about how “good” people – i.e., those who believe in God – were somehow better, that their relationship with God would guide their feet and their actions. They would see other human beings as just that – human beings – and treat them as they would want to be treated. For Christians that principle is actually in the Bible: “In everything …do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Matthew 7:12)

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But it seems that Christians, and others who have professed a belief in God, have ignored that precept in far too many instances. My awareness of this was probably brewing throughout my youth when I watched some of my Christian friends be mean to others, but it reached a peak when I read about one Sam Bowers.

In the 60s, Bowers was the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and he was also the leader of the Mississippi White Knights, a secret division of the KKK. In the 60s, the Mississippi White Knights claimed a membership of over 10,000. The FBI attributed nine murders and 300 beatings, burnings, and bombings to this group led by Bowers. He was the mastermind behind the killings of three civil rights workers in 1964 – Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman – and led the group in 1966 in the killing of Vernon Dahmer, a Black man who helped register Black people to vote. (https://www.clarionledger.com/story/journeytojustice/2014/07/09/sam-bowers-mississippi-burning-christian-identity/12394409/).

What got to me is that Bowers was a devout Christian. At the time I learned this I did not know – and did not know there could be – a Christianity without Christ and without God. According to reporter Stuart Wexler, Bowers, as well as many others, “embraced a Godless ideology and relinquished God’s grace.” Because of his Christ-less Christianity, he enveloped and embraced parts of the practice of Christianity with which he was familiar, including prayer and fasting – but he led people to pray and fast as they prepared to conduct murderous raids on Black people in the South. (Charles Marsh: God’s Long Summer)

Brutal violence carried out by humans who profess to follow God against other humans is not a rarity. From street murders to domestic violence, to wars – humans murder and maim others and still profess a belief in God. The spiritualist Howard Thurman, noting the ferocity of the hatred and violence carried out during war wrote, “During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable, even as it has to masquerade under the guise of patriotism.”

people gathering on street during nighttime — Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

It is because of the human capacity to feel and act upon hatred that resides in the human spirit that violence is so common and so brutal. I cannot understand how Europeans who said they loved God were able to carry out genocide of non-white people in the lands they “discovered.” I cannot understand, again, how religious, church-going people were able to brutalize the Congolese under the direction of King Leopold II of Belgium and think nothing of it, nor can I understand how the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II is still regarded as an act of heroism. Neither can I understand how religious people seem to take as a matter of fact – of righteous fact, if the truth be told – the genocide of Native Americans in this country, and the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany, and I cannot understand why the world deems it to be OK for the Israeli government to be destroying the Palestinians en masse, when it is Hamas they are seeking to annihilate as a result of that group’s terrorist attack on innocent Israelis.

The number of people killed because of violence is staggering. It is estimated that 100,000 Native Americans were forced to walk the Trail of Tears and that about 15,000 of them died. Between 1500 and 1866, it is estimated that 12.5 million Africans were transported from Africa to the Americas and that about 1.8 million died during the Middle Passage. Data shows that about 6,500 Africans and African Americans died due to lynching carried out between 1865 and 1950, and during the Civil War, 620,000 were killed. In World War I, 21 million people lost their lives, including over 9 million military personnel. In World War II, 38 million people were killed, and in the Vietnam War, 3.8 million died. I could go on, but I think the point has been made.

I cannot believe that any of this is OK with God, yet God lets it happen. In our creation, God apparently included a spiritual path toward hatred and violence, a path that allowed us to think that hating and killing what God had created was OK. To me, that means our creation is or was flawed – if we are to believe that our assignment in life is to follow God. If it is OK with God that people bypass the religion taught to us that said God is good and that God requires us to live in harmony with each other, then there is something wrong. We are – or people like me are – looking for a God that does not exist.

Please understand: I am not saying that looking for a God of community and love is the only way to practice religion, nor am I saying that anyone who is looking for that kind of God is successful in meeting that criterion all of the time. We fail miserably as humans. But it seems that a belief in a God that disparages evil and hatred of others, and outright violence – including murder – is a problem. I yearn for a divine intervention in which God says to those who live in violence and hatred “Enough!” I yearn for a God who sits heavily on the shoulders and in the hearts of those who profess belief.

God’s silence in the light of the inhumanity we as humans practice against each other is troubling, more so because those who have no trouble fighting against, taking away the rights of, or murdering those whom they dislike for one reason or another profess belief in that God.

Sam Bowers had prayer and fasting for his murderous lynching crews; people who stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, stopped while in the Congress building to lift holy hands and pray. In the 18th century, Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon entitled, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” I would challenge Edwards and say we are humans in the hands of a silent God, one who is permissive of the evil we are prone to practice against each other.

Any more, as I read and study the violence we perpetrate against others, I shudder. My God is silent and unavailable or unwilling to stop our destruction of each other – actions that we take based on hatred, greed, or the lust for power – or of all of those issues. Why the silence, God? Why?

A candid observation…