I confess that I’m a little lost, presently.
Lately I’ve become a restless, reluctant nomad.
I am a lifelong American, who is profoundly disoriented trying to navigate this nation now.
I was born here and have spent most of my half a century here—and yet since November 2016, I’ve begun to feel more and more like a stranger here.
There are dozens, sometimes hundreds of moments in a given day, when I look around and I simply don’t recognize this place anymore. It all seems terrifyingly foreign.
Waking up every morning and walking out into this version of my country, is that bittersweet experience of expectantly visiting the town you grew up in as a child, and feeling the rapid let down as you note the changed landscape and strain to see the places you used to know well and feel at home in.
Yes, it’s still a version of the familiar, with quick glimpses here and there to momentarily ground you—but so much seems missing and so much feels different, that you begin to grieve the alterations that have taken place because of how much appears gone for good.
In my disorientation, I’ve found myself searching frantically for old familiar landmarks to try and orient myself again; family, church, national leadership—but these have all been renovated to the point of being almost completely obscured by the grotesque facades in their place: newly fashionable malevolence and bitterness and ugliness.
And it isn’t just the landscape that has changed—there are so many people that I do not recognize anymore; people whose lives I used to call home, people who now make me feel newly orphaned.
I now feel unsettled and unwelcome in their presence; estranged from them because of what I’ve discovered about their hearts, what I’ve heard our of their mouths, what I am realizing about our new moral incompatibility.
I see them selling off their souls in small parcels, and I mourn because they don’t seem to fathom how high a cost that actually is to them, to this country, and to those who will inherit it.
They are the new America that I am most disheartened to bear witness to. They are the greatest source of my lostness. They force me to wander.
Maybe it was never the place I thought it was. Maybe it’s just selective memory, or the idealized version of it all, as filtered through a younger, less aware, more optimistic version of myself. Still, the loss feels the same.
Part of me wants to leave altogether, to go and make a new home someplace else, but that would feel like surrender, it would be admitting a defeat that I am still not ready to consent to.
Right now, the best thing I know to do right now is to keep my eyes open for the other restless, reluctant nomads; to look for those who too feel lost here, but who are still out there trying to cultivate quiet, gentle personal goodness in the middle of the loud, sickening march toward national greatness.
I’ll keep seeking out those compassionate, generous open-hearted outliers, who also no longer feel at home here—and together we will shepherd humanity through these days, and we will be rebuilders.
We will make an America where our diversity is our greatest aspiration.
We’ll make an America where religion isn’t wielded like a weapon.
We’ll make an America that is big enough for everyone who wishes to call it home.
We’ll make an America that requires no one to go elsewhere.
I’m an American who is lost in America right now—but I refuse to lose America.
