America, we will soon say goodbye to something.

One way or another, this year will end with a farewell.

It will either close with a glorious, triumphant blast of freedom—or with the sickening death knell of a once-great nation, gone for good.

Either America will part ways with this president or we will part ways with democracy.

Those are the choices here.

This moment is about each of us choosing which we’re committed to losing.

It is about deciding whether we will fight for this person, or for the disparate, multitudinous We The People who have shaped and defined and co-created it for two hundred and forty-three years.

As a child, I grew up being taught that the beauty of this nation was found in the personal liberties it promised for every human being without condition or caveat, the strength of the system that protected those liberties, and the people of integrity placed in positions of power that defended us against attacks on those liberties, whether they came from within or without.

The very bedrock of who we have been and would be (I was told), was the power of the collective voice of the people to determine our destiny together: of our individual wills tethered together like a sail that would steer us where we dreamed of heading as a country.

I believed that story and it was a story I had complete confidence in—until this week.

Right now, that story is at the precipice of becoming fiction.

In this very moment, as you read these words, our interdependent destinies are being written. I wonder what History will record about us. I wonder if any leaders are going to stand in this day and be courageous; if any of the people around this unhinged despot will decide that the temporary affections of a traitorous madman are not worth the assassination of a Republic. I wonder of the small army of self-righteous professed Christians around him, will embrace the sacred call upon their lives to be agents of justice and mercy to the vulnerable and the oppressed. I wonder how many will forfeit their souls to gain a few seats in Congress. 

And if all else fails, if no one rises to oppose this desperate and transparent coup; if the systems have been so perverted that they no longer hold the will of the people and if those entrusted to lead us have been so compromised that they no longer care to save us—I wonder if we are prepared to do what is required to demand that our will be done.

This has nothing to do with a politician or a political party—it is about the elemental core of America; its beautiful, beating human heart.

If every vote does not count, if each voice no longer matters, if elections are now academic—we are no longer who the songs and anthems declare we are. We are no longer the words chiseled into monuments announcing ourselves as a compassionate refuge for tired, huddled masses who long to breathe deeply in the winds of liberty. We are not a place worthy of the flag or the people who have defended it and died for it.

If we decide to yield the will of the American people to any person or any group of politicians (no matter who they are), we will have severed our last ties to everything that made us a brilliant beacon of light to this world.

We will have co-written the epitaph of this nation in this moment.

So Americans: Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; people of deep faith and of no religious affiliation; people of every pigmentation, orientation, and kind; those of every corner of this country that has given them a home—we need to decide who or what we will say goodbye to right now.

We either say goodbye to him: to a man who is so far beneath the privilege of leading America—or we say goodbye to America.

Those are the options.

Our farewell today, will define us forever.

I pray we’re not ready to say goodbye to America yet.

I think our best years can still be ahead—we just need to live long enough to see them.

 

 

AP Photo/David Goldman

Unity.

That’s the word I hear a lot right now.

In the wake of an election that is still being inexplicably contested by this president (one clearly won by President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris), I am being asked to show unity with his supporters; to extend some instant olive branch of understanding that magically bridges that cavernous gap between us—ones he revealed and is still actively cultivating. 

I’m sorry, but that isn’t something I’m willing to offer unconditionally and without caveat.

We’ve been at this for five years.
It isn’t as though I haven’t been working tireless to understand and to reach these people; to appeal to their sense of decency, to illuminate the damage they are doing to oppressed and marginalized human beings and invite them into something more redemptive. They have chosen him again, and so I know quite a bit about them—which is why I am so aware that we do not have any meaningful points of affinity.

I am deeply invested in the work of building disparate community, in navigating differences, in seeing the inherent commonalities of our shared humanity. I have made that my life’s work for three decades as a pastor and activist—but there are limits to what this means.

Yes, I am burdened to bring diverse people together.

Yes, I am called by my faith to care for all human beings in my path.

And yes, I am compelled to really see them individually and to value their specific stories.

But I am not obligated to have unity with hateful people.

I am not morally bound to make peace with a heart that dehumanizes other human beings because of the color of their skin, their nation of origin, their gender, their orientation. And to have embraced Donald Trump now, is to unapologetically brandish such a polluted heart; to be actively perpetuating inequity and stoking division and manufacturing discrimination in this very moment.

I steadfastly refuse such an alliance. I am a loud, conscientious objector in their war against the world.

His movement is singularly focused on causing injury to vulnerable people—and to suddenly declare unity with his base, would be a betrayal of those who they consistently brutalize, both personally, collectively, and legislatively.

It would be a slap in the face to migrant children, to people of color, to LGBTQ human beings, to Muslims, to disabled people, to non-Christians, and to women—for me to suddenly allow the willing and joyous perpetrators of their wounds, proximity to me in the name of some ceremonial unity.

Racists and bigots see other human beings as less than human for an unchangeable part of who they are, and I will not descend into that. I can fully see their humanity and still call them out for thinking and speaking and acting inhumanely—and I can show them decency and simultaneously declare myself distinct from the malevolence they affirm and want to live with distance from them. 

People of faith, morality, and conscience are not required to make peace with hatred.

They are not indebted to racism and bigotry and phobic violence.

The call to love our enemies does not necessitate abiding their enmity. 

The only thing you owe violent people is to see and respect their humanity in ways they refuse for others.

But you are not required to see their hatred as acceptable.

You don’t owe hateful people unity—ever.

 

President Trump,

I wonder how much pain you’re willing to cause America.

Apparently, more than you already have.

It isn’t enough that you have spent every waking moment of the past four years manufacturing urgency for this nation, that you have continually appealed to the very worst nature of your followers; weaponizing them against their neighbors, friends, family members, and strangers.

It isn’t enough that you have perpetually trafficked in lies, when the truth would have been much simpler and much less fraught with suffering and sickness; that you were almost habitually allergic to honesty even when honesty would have greatly benefited you.

It isn’t enough that you have steadily stoked the fires of racism, that you have courted wild conspiracy, that you’ve never once taken the path of maturity, compassion, and sober judgment in stewarding this nation.

It isn’t enough that you have been so guilty of presidential malpractice, that you have inexplicably made a public health crisis a partisan event, allowing a quarter of a million Americans to die, many of them needlessly—one that you are currently simply ignoring.

And now, after all that, you’ve chosen to do something far worse as your swan song: to go to war with the very bedrock of this nation: a free and fair election by the people—simply because you cannot live with what they are telling you.

You are indicting a process that you spent months poisoning and polluting and sabotaging, when even those unprecedented efforts to create chaos and silence voters would not deter a record number of Americans from telling you that you are not worthy to lead them.

You are revealing your character in these moments.

A decent man would honor the unequivocal and clear will of the people.
A decent man would concede with dignity immediately in order to allow calm to prevail.
A decent man would agree to a peaceful transfer of power, as every previous outgoing president has.
A decent man would look at a nation ravaged by a pandemic, devastated by job loss, and exhausted from internal strife—and decide to end his tenure here by finally, for the first time, doing something selfless.

But you are not a decent man by any measurement, and that is simply beyond your capacity. You are incapable of the elemental goodness that even the most malevolent people are eventually able to tap into when called upon by moments of gravity and consequence.

I should have known it would end this way.

This is who you have always been: a man lacking a single noble instinct or humane impulse; a completely parasitic presence who only takes from things it attaches itself to, leaving them less healthy and less viable than before.

Your ornamental America First rhetoric is burning up in the presence of your caustic conduct right now.

You have never loved this nation or cared for its people, because if you had and if you did, you would be an adult man and a true leader, and admit defeat and allow this nation to begin to heal and recover. Instead you incite violence and stir your unhinged base and speak reckless, incendiary lies that will only serve to injure more people and try and avoid your eventual departure.

And make no mistake, that departure is imminent.
You are leaving.
The American people have made that clear.
Every president before you has honored that.
And whether you like or not, you will, too.

It’s just really sad that you couldn’t take this moment and finally become a better version of yourself;
that instead of being a source of stability and strength for this disaster-battered nation, that you would make your final days here ones marked by unnecessary suffering and manufactured sorrow;
that in one more traitorous, belligerent salvo, you will assail the very heart of democracy in order to defend your brittle, fragile ego.

History is recording the truth: that you will have caused more injury to America and its people than any of the men who have served the office you hold and will shortly be removed from. You will have even done more destruction to our sovereignty and safety than any imagined foreign threat. That, you cannot spin or gaslight or lie your way out of.

Joe Biden is going to be our next president.

You will soon be leaving, Mr. President.

And sadly, it looks as though you will leave the way you have led and the way you have lived your entire life: disgracefully.

It’s simply a national tragedy that all the previous damage you’ve done and all the wounds you have inflicted on America and its people were not enough for you.

 

The delayed results of the presidential election will be revealed soon, but in many ways, those results will be secondary to what we already know now: we were wrong about America.

The fact that it was even close, the fact that more people voted for him a second time, the fact that a higher number of white women inexplicably affirmed him—it is all confirmation that whether we remove the very visible, unsightly symptom or not, the pervasive disease is still horribly afflicting us.

Numbed by a cocktail of optimism and ignorance, many of us imagined this was a sick, momentary aberration; a temporary glitch in the system that would surely be remedied: after so much ugliness, such open disregard for people of color, such inhumanity toward migrant children, such a sickening failure in the face of this pandemic—sanity would surely come to the rescue.

We were certain that we would collectively course-correct; that the pendulum that had so wildly swung toward inhumanity would come roaring back to decency in these days; that we would presently be basking in the glory of a radiant dawn referendum on all this bloated bigotry.

We thought we would be dancing on the grave of fascism.

We thought, of course the good people of this nation would come to their collective senses, leaving behind political affiliations and superficial preferences and ceremonial ties, to rescue us from a malevolence that had proven itself unworthy of its position and toxic to its people.

We were certain there would be a mass repudiation of the racism that this man has revealed and the violence he’s nurtured, because for all its flaws we really believed America was better than this.

We were wrong.

We were wrong to believe that white people weaned for decades on supremacy, would suddenly embrace disparate humanity and make more space at the table.
We were wrong to believe that white Christians would finally have the scales fall from their eyes and abandon their blind adoration of this vile false prophet of enmity, and once again embrace the expansive, compassionate heart of Jesus.
We were wrong to believe that kindness and science and facts and truth and goodness would be found more valuable than the fool’s gold of sneering, star-spangled, American greatness.
We were wrong to hope that more Republicans would cross party lines in order to defend their country from the greatest terrorist threat in our lifetime.
We were wrong to believe that hope would rise up to cast out fear.

And most of all, we were wrong about people we know and love and live alongside and work with and study beside; about our parents, spouses, siblings, uncles, best friends, and neighbors: they are not the people we thought they were and we do not live in the country we thought we lived in.

We believed the best about this nation and we were mistaken.

To many oppressed and vulnerable communities, to people who have long known the depth of America’s sickness because they have experienced it in traffic stops and workplace mistreatment and opportunity inequity and the bitter words of strangers—this may be less shocking news than it is to those of us with greater privilege and more buffers to adversity and the luxury of naiveté.

But this is the sober spot in which we stand now: realizing that our optimism about the whole of this nation was misplaced,
our prayers for the better angels of so many white Christians were unanswered,
our childish illusions that people were indeed basically good and decent, seared away in their reaffirmation of something that the rest of the watching world finds reprehensible.

And now, we’re left with two terribly unfortunate choices: leave the America we have, because it is so very different than the America we hoped for—or stay, realizing that we are surrounded by so many people for whom racism is not only not a deal breaker but a selling point; in a place we know is less safe and less decent and less kind than we wanted—not because of any politician but because of those who embraced him a second time, people who share our kitchen tables and churches and break rooms and cul-de-sacs.

I don’t know what the right decision is.

Right now, the only thing I know is that I expected something fully beautiful and life-affirming was going to mark this day and it isn’t.

I was certain we were better than him, but we are not.

I was so sure that even though I know hatred dies hard, that America was going to let love have the last, loudest word.

I thought I was wrong.

But maybe, I just have to wait to be right.