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The Relationships This Presidency is Ruining

Donald Trump is making orphans every single day in America—and more than merely the thousands of migrant children he separated their families on our Southern border (many he has yet to reunite.)

His Presidency is creating a generation of displaced adults; people who have found themselves pushed to the periphery in their families, to the breaking point in their marriages, and to estrangement in their friendships. His polarizing rhetoric and abject cruelty have become unscalable dividing lines.

The relational fractures are everywhere:

Unspoken silences now replace what once was deep intimacy between people, as they try to salvage some semblance of connection, in unions now marked by a million things they are no longer able to talk about.

Once easy relationships have become deadly minefields to gingerly navigate; email exchanges and table conversations and social media discussions now fraught with quiet coldness, passive aggressive salvos, or outright disdain.

Formerly treasured holiday gatherings are now seasonal dreaded occasions, that magnify the emotional or geographic distance the past two years have yielded. Christmases and birthdays and Father’s Days have become anniversaries of the brokenness.

Adult children are forced to become prodigals by parents entrenched in theological positions they can no longer abide.
Siblings are being driven apart, as the vast differences between them on matters of race, sexuality, and diversity have surfaced.
Lifelong friendships are quickly dissolving in the toxic flood of incendiary Tweets and kitchen table diatribes.
Marriages and partnerships are feeling the strain as two people try to withstand the ever-growing distance between.

Every day people share with me the grief of all that they are losing or having to walk away from.
Every day the President indelibly carves into the expanse between them and the people they love.
Every day the exodus continues, the disconnection grows, and the bridges are burned beyond saving—as people realize that they no longer are at home in the places they once belonged or they no longer want to reside there.

It isn’t political disagreement, it’s divergence on a fundamental level; as people realize they may need to let go of relationships in order to hold on to the deepest contents of their hearts, to be their truest selves, to use their most authentic voices.

They are choosing to be alone right now, rather than have proximity with people who seem incapable of empathy, who seem impervious to other people’s suffering, who are mortally allergic to truth.

This Presidency has uncovered repulsive things that were buried just below the surface in our families and friendships, or reopened wounds that have never fully healed—and the disconnection is epidemic. Many people are leaving loved ones, either voluntarily out of self-preservation or unwillingly because they’ve been told they are no longer welcome.

I can see in my own life, the growing list of family members and old co-workers and former friends who have left, or whose presence I needed to leave—and I see similar attrition in millions of people’s lives.

It’s been a source of tremendous grieving:
the relational separations themselves,
the waste of all the time we’ve lost with people,
those who have died with unbroken barriers between them and loved ones,
and at the smallness of the man who has created these fractures.
It’s all been such a profound waste.

Yes, there are new forms of family being born right now; ones not by blood but by shared convictions.
Tribes of affinity are forming as the orphans and the abandoned and the displaced are assembling to do work in the world.
All these weary refugees from their old homelands are finding a new sanctuary in one another’s presence.
This is all beautiful news.

But it’s all been necessary, because of the terrible disconnection that is taking place, because of all the separations this Presidency is creating, because of the irreparable harm it is doing to the most important bonds. A border wall has already been erected, and we’re standing on the outside.

Some folks may believe they’re making America great again—but we MAGA orphans know better.

We know how bad it really is.

And we know that it will never be the same.

 

 

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