I Know What It Is...

...I was there.

I set out today to create something not overtly political and maybe a bit upbeat for Thanksgiving 🙄 week, but I can’t entirely let this terrible post-election moment go. Indulge me for a while as I attempt to hack my way out of this jungle (maybe one-for-two isn’t bad?).

Let’s get started:

The problem is that we aren’t who a lot of us thought we were. We carry legends within ourselves, and we come nearly to believe them at times. Around 2008, it seemed for a while we might imagine ourselves into a way forward in spite of ourselves. It didn’t happen. Probably never will. I can’t foresee an orderly, institutional remedy for our looming existential national crisis. For as far into the future as anyone can now imagine, we can’t further evolve beyond the cultural framework of 1860 and the coming tyranny that will try to enforce it.

That’s a tragedy for many of us who have long hoped for a more inclusive and (we think) civilized society. For about as many others, that’s their fondest hopes realized. We’ve always thought more highly of ourselves than we deserved. We’ve been lucky. All it finally took in the end was one demonically-tuned, monotonous evil instrument to coax our dormant racism and our inherent misogyny and nativism to the surface (not once, but TWICE!), and to make it comfortable and acceptable again. This isn’t Peter the Apostle or baseball. Two chances are about all you get in this business. Our American Humpty-Dumpty is fallen and shattered. He won’t heal anytime soon 😢.

And to those protesting “Oh, it’s the economy!” or such other respectable fig-leaf canard you might conjure about Ms. Harris or whatever: You may manage to fool others or even yourselves, but you can’t fool me. I grew-up around many of you in a small, insular Kentucky town. I KNOW what it is. I’ve been right there with you talking in code (or maybe sometimes NOT in code). I know what it is. And when I got a little older and my views evolved in a different direction, I occasionally noticed the conversations awkwardly change as I approached groups of guys casually talking. I think I now have a better sense of WHY that happened and of the sort of things that were being discussed. And I think in similar circumstances today, the conversations wouldn’t change much at all in my presence. We’ve crossed a divide of acceptable manners and style. We can’t negotiate our way back. I know what it is.

And to those who say that I’m not describing you, that you're not any of those things, I hear you. I know you aren’t terrible people for the most part (some in leadership and in the wackier fringes in your camp actually are). I know you have compassionate hearts face-to-face and within your cultural frames. Many of you I’ve regarded as friends. But I AM saying that if you thought you heard an answer to ANY of our country’s ills in the hateful semi-coded ‘otherness’ and fake-religious ‘patriotism’ promoted so relentlessly and so monotonously by the winning (and pathologically criminal) Presidential candidate, something is amiss within you.

If you pushed that particular button in the face of a legitimate respectable alternative (72% of the voters in my home county did just that🥴!), you contributed a share (knowingly or otherwise) to an abusive evil presence that will haunt us far into the future. If it goes where I think it will, I don’t know that I can forgive that. I think of myself as a Christian person, but I’m not Jesus Christ. Some offenses ask too much. We’ll see.

Happy Thanksgiving. 🤔