I'm writing this as I sit in my nice comfortable chair in my warm apartment with air conditioning and electricity and an internet connection and my wife asleep and safe in the bedroom down the hall. The door to my apartment is locked but I could probably leave it open without much fear of anyone nefarious coming through it.
But as I write this there are people far away from me who are dying in a war that I don't know nearly enough about to have an opinion about. There people don't sleep in nice safe beds or get the luxury of staying up during a calm night--they need whatever sleep they can get I am sure.
And as I write this other people are standing, sitting, marching in airports around my home country. They are protesting the executive order that the new President of the United States put into action earlier this weekend, an order that bans people from certain countries from coming into the states. Even if they are already legally allowed to enter.
It is hard for me to express how angry I am.
I'm angry at this man. Donald Trump. To treat people like this, to see suffering, need, desperation, fear, want--to see all of these things and to see a threat, to see an Other...It disgusts me. I'm not being hyperbolic. I feel a deep, primal seething disgust for this man. Perhaps some of this is from being too far in a liberal bubble? I do live in Baton Rouge after all--a haven for all things liberal. Perhaps I'm over reacting. It's just Muslims! It's just 90 days, just 120! Calm down, we're just trying to get better vetting processes in place, what about Obama her emails blah blah blah
The truth is that I don't care if I'm over reacting, Those arguments are so foul, so loathsome that I cannot even form a coherent argument against them right now. Plenty of smarter people than I have and are forming excellent, cogent reasons for why the people who think like that are idiot cowards. I can't, though. All I can see is the racism, the unbridled hate behind it which makes me furious and, even more so, the craven cowardice of these old, weak white men. They fear this change, they fear the loss of the power they've had for two-thousand years. They fear black and brown people, gay people, women, everything Other and to them everything IS Other and it makes me want to scream to know that the world is this evil and this cruel to allow people like this to have power and to control the fate of these poor people who suffer and starve and are raped and beaten and murdered. For what? What is the great evil that these cravens are protecting the people of this country from? What could be worth telling a five year old child to turn back, to return to certain death?
I'm angry at myself, though, too. These things make me feel weak, useless, and as cowardly as these disgusting men who ruin lives by staining white paper with ink as black as their hearts. What am I doing to help people? What have I ever done for someone else that really mattered? How dare I sit here in my position of such absolute privilege and talk about how angry these things make me feel? How can I even have to gall to complain about wanting to complain? I know the response to this feeling is to get off my ass and do something but I feel like there's nothing I could do anyway. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a soldier, I'm not a teacher. I'm a 31 year old white guy who's read too many fantasy novels and pitches a fit when he's forced to admit that the world is so far from the ideal that it's nearly unrecognizable, And that makes me angry. Angry at myself, angry at my fellow Americans who helped this loathsome man take power and sweep into our highest office with such hate and abject fear.
I don't know what will happen. I hope things change. I hope the world turns and things get better. But I fear that they won't. I fear that what I've always thought will turn out to be true. That the world is a grinder that runs on hatred and terror and uses it's hard, hard teeth to crush the good and the kind and the weak and the innocent into grist for the rich and powerful and cruel and strong. I hope I'm wrong.
But I don't think I am.
