This was never about him.
My Trump-supporting neighbors, family members, and former friends think it has been but my sadness really has nothing to do with him. From the very beginning he’s just been a spotlight. Over the past few years, he has simply revealed clearly the hidden ugliness of the place I call home and the people I live here alongside and that is the thing I grieve over. And this is not the mourning over a singular political loss a few years ago, it has been a daily and pervasive grieving; a bleak, protracted funeral.
I’ve grieved seeing elementary school teachers dressed up like a border wall for Halloween.
I’ve grieved watching a white woman screaming obscenities at two Muslims teenagers at a stop light.
I’ve grieved seeing a Jewish professor’s office littered with spray-painted swastikas.
I’ve grieved witnessing white high school seniors making a “Heil Hitler” arm gesture during class photos.
I’ve grieved reading the contempt from my white neighbors when young black men die at traffic stops.
I’ve grieved seeing the most vile sickness on my social media feed hurled toward people of color and women and immigrants and transgender people.
I’ve grieved hearing professed Christian pastors calling for the eradication of LGBTQ human beings.
I’ve grieved seeing rambling, racist tirades on subway cars filled with families with young children.
I’ve grieved watching openly supremacist candidates being elected and re-elected.
I’ve grieved overhearing dehumanizing conversations from old white men, about Democratic women leaders in crowded cafés.
I’ve grieved sitting across holiday tables and witnessing bigoted tirades that I’d have thought the people gathered there were not capable of.
And though all of these things are undoubtedly emboldened by him and encouraged by him and celebrated by him, that is not the source of my despair. It is the reality that all of this vicious, toxic filth that we are collectively infected with today is something people I loved and once respected are seemingly fine with. The rising hatred has never been alarming or discomforting enough to them to move them to action, or to speak or vote against it.
With their silence as much as with their volume, with their absence as much as their presence, they tell me that they are still more with him than they are against him, that they are more like him than different from him, and that they and I are increasingly morally incompatible. His bigotry has not been a dealbreaker for them—and this is a dealbreaker for me.
So yes, his ascendence has been a raking light illuminating everything hidden and I am viewing my countrymen and women through him.
I no longer see America or my church or my neighborhood or my family the same anymore and I’m not sure I ever will again.
But that isn’t the worst of it.
To me, the greatest tragedy of all of this isn’t him. It isn’t that the person who once held power in our country and seeks to again, lacks a single benevolent impulse, that he is impervious to compassion, incapable of nobility, and mortally allergic to simple kindness.
The greatest tragedy is how many Americans he now represents—and that he apparently represents those I loved and lived alongside.
That’s where the sadness is and why I mourn the loss of the people I thought I knew.
Long after he is gone, that grief will remain.
No election result will change that.
