I feel like I’m being gaslighted.
You remember, don’t you, what Donald Trump has CONSISTENTLY said about us? You remember how he consistently insulted us in ways worse than we have ever witnessed a candidate insult us in recent memory, right?
He got into office by being a bully. That’s the clear and inconvenient truth. I realize that it’s uncomfortable. I realize that this is a time when, more than ever, you may want to have a Kum-Bah-Yah moment and pretend that there are warm feelings of unity here. I realize that anger and depression is uncomfortable. I realize that the fight has grown wearisome. I realize that you might be exhausted and just want to go along to get along.
But the fact is that if you do that now, you are teaching this country that when a bully bullies you and your friends, apologize to the bully. Hug the bully. And if your friends are seriously hurt and wounded in the worst ways possible by the bully, force them to hug the smirking bully, too.
Because the cold, hard, inconvenient truth is that Trump is not contrite. He is the same man he was before he got elected.
The truth is that he is a misogynist – well, that would be an understatement. He is a sexual assaulter, an unapologetic and cruel one who said he would sue the victims. He treats women, minorities, the disabled, and the LGBT community draw-droppingly horribly. This is a nightmare of a person.
We should not be running to embrace him. I know he has power, and I know that there is a lot of pressure, due to that power, to play nice. But to play nice to Trump is to spit in the face of every single woman who cannot stand the cold hard fact that “grab them by the pussy” is rapidly becoming an anthem of this country we all so dearly love.
We need to see who is actually, really in pain, and it’s not the Trump supporters. What, after treating us more cruelly than they have in decades, we’re supposed to suddenly make peace?
They taught us how to win the battle. They didn’t make peace. They made war, and it worked. And every single time that we have rebelled in this country and done it successfully, we have been successful because we were driven, because we were able to fight out of pure determination and passion and fire rushing through every vein.
I am not here to make peace. I have tried that. I have sat in your pews, America, and tried to forgive. And forgiveness never got me anything but more oppression. It’s the honey-sweet cruel lie that gives you and excuse to pound, pound, pound away at every ounce of my dignity.
You want me to make peace with you? The goal is not peace. The goal is justice for the undocumented immigrants and Muslims you want cruelty for. I will not make peace that empowers bullies. I will make peace with the people they are oppressing. I will make peace with the ones they marginalize.
I am someone who likes, and wants urgently, to get along with people, as stridently as this may be written. But I want to get along with EVERYONE in this country, not just the people at the top. Because I love this country, all of it. And if you do not act as if you love all this country – especially the most vulnerable people in it – I will choose them over you, every time. Because I believe in the fact – and am willing to sacrifice my life on the fact – that every single goddamn person in this goddamn country deserves love; deserves to be in a country that knows it cares about them; deserves not to feel like an alien in the place they work, eat, sleep and raise their children; deserves not to be sexually harassed because their bodies are seen as objects or plain things for a billionaire and his cronies; deserves not to be cheated out of a decent wage and education and healthcare.
If you are cruel to them, then we will have to part ways, because I am not and I will fight fire with fire or do whatever it takes to stop you. I will not shake your hand, bully, while your cronies beat up my friends.
And it is cruel. It is cruel to tell a woman that the people who cheer at “grab her by the pussy” and “lock her up” and “I moved on her like a bitch” – it is cruel to tell her you have to smile and to turn the other cheek.
It is cruel to tell black individuals, when they are being unconstitutionally stopped-and-frisked under the infamous attorney general Giuliani, that they should play nice in the face of private prisons built on profit and racism, and that they should turn the other cheek in the face of a President who insists that black men are guilty of death, as with the Central Park 5, and insists they are guilty when there is DNA evidence to the contrary and the real perpetrator has confessed.
I can think of few things crueler than telling Hispanics to play nice when people want to deport them across the border, ripping undocumented men, women, and children out of their homes and into deportation camps in ways that would make Hitler blush, with a giant deportation force and a constant demonization of even the youngest and most vulnerable of them.
I can think of few things more heartless than to tell someone who is disabled and looked anxiously for hope and fairness that they have to respect someone who makes the bullying worse, who indicates that the bullying is OK.
I can think of few things more cruel than to say to those who fought for same-sex marriage, often deeply in the closet, and who had hopes that one day they would not be fired or kicked out of housing because they were lesbian, gay, trans, or genderqueer…for you to tell them that they have to make nice to people who have called them an abomination, who want nothing more than to break their bonds of love, who want to make it easier than ever to segregate them, who would return them to the suicidal effects of electroshock therapy, who wants nothing more than a license for paternalistic hate.
I am not going to be cruel to these people.
And so I am not going to say those things.
And I am going to fight against everyone who does say those things as hard as I know how.
And I am going to fight anyone who will sideline these and any other of the many groups of people Trump has sidelined.
The preachers are hired and in full force, like the Negro preachers hired to pacify the cruelly treated slaves. But I will not join their ranks.
This is not the time to play nice. This is the time to fight.
Buckle up America.
Thank you for reading.
PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep doing what I’m doing.