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| Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Stock: Getty Images |
For millions of us there is a profound sense of relief, of jubilation and joy, of hope and solidarity, and of visions of a nation whose government will actually finally begin to serve the all the people and the planet rather than further enrich the most powerful among us ― and to the detriment of us all. We celebrate what appears to be a death blow to the inhumane, immoral, criminal, and brutal policies and narratives and ideologies that have dominated the MAGA era. We can breathe again! But not all of us...
Millions of our immigrant sisters and brothers continue to be terrorized, imprisoned, injured and killed, deported to countries different from their own, and living under conditions of extreme trauma, dehumanization, and violence. And now Trump has designated and empowered Stephen Miller to be his Chief of Staff. Which is horrifying!
That said, it is also true that millions of conservative Americans are swept up in horror and grief, hopelessness and fear, and a certainty that America is now doomed. These sisters and brothers also need to be held with compassion and caring and the recognition of a deeper truth ― that, on a continuum, we have all been impacted by the propaganda that is endlessly thrown at us by the powerful.
This is not the time for judgment, name calling, or condemnation of those who have absorbed continuous toxic narratives that if MAGA doesn't prevail...
- The communists and socialists will overtake our government
- We will become a third world country
- Our economy will be devastated and huge numbers of us will be thrown into poverty
- America will no longer be recognized as a Christian nation
- Muslim jihadists will be elected into positions of power
- Democratic rule will be done by those who hate our country
- Our borders will be over run by criminals and rapists and drug cartels
- The blood of our country will be poisoned
- Children will undergo sex change operations in their schools and without parental permission
- Abortion for any reason right up until and even after birth will be legal
- Our guns will be taken away
- DEI will become the law of the land (diversity, equity, and inclusion)
- Christian values will be destroyed and it will be denied that there is only one religion ― Christianity ― which guarantees salvation
- America will be destroyed from within and will become unrecognizable from the visions of our Founding Fathers
While many of us were not immersed day after day, year after year in these beliefs, many of us were. And all of us need to be held with compassion. The impulse to return dehumanization with more of the same only serves to perpetuate the cycles of harm and hatred, separation and division, heartlessness and violence and delusion.
There is an imperative, I believe, to understand that this overwhelming election which favored the Democratic Party is but a beginning. To understand both the hope and the peril of where we are at right now, we who are celebrating the crushing defeat for Trump and his brutal policies must not stop there. We must also understand the larger picture of the circumstances and conditions long embraced by the neoliberal corporatists, the "centrists", within the Democratic Party that have played a major role in bringing us Trump and ushering us into the horrifying fascist era we've been experiencing.
And this is not new. For a long time, we have not been okay.
To enable and empower vast powerful positive solutions and radical change to evolve and unfold, we must hold in conscious awareness a deep understanding of the problem. Any politician who is beholding to powerful interests is inevitably compromised in their integrity, their authenticity, and their commitment to actually serve We The People and the planet. Too many Republicans and Democrats are in bed with Wall Street and the Big Banks, the fossil fuel industry and the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, the prison industrial and animal agricultural industries, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee; please go to AIPAC Tracker: https://www.trackaipac.com/) and the funders of genocide, brutal immigration policies and the terrorism of ICE, and other wealthy individual and corporate interests.
Since the death of Citizens United in 2010 (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained) wealthy interests have been able to buy our politicians. The horrors that have come in the wake of this decision have only grown with Elon Musk able to pour $474 million into the 2026 midterm elections alone. This is the evil that true democracy has come up against in America. And few in positions of power have been able to resist selling their souls to the highest bidder.
Which brings us back again to the peril of this moment. Henry Giroux describes it best, making it so clear why must not rest on our laurels:
With the Democratic Party’s landslide victory, a day of reckoning appears to have arrived for Trump and the far-right, white nationalist forces that have turned cruelty into a governing principle and hatred into a political language. Something has broken in the machinery of fear. The fascist politics of racial hatred, organized cruelty, and contempt for human dignity have encountered a moment of resistance. Too much suffering, too much misery, too much authoritarian violence. Enough is enough, at least for the moment. The Trump regime has exposed some of the darkest impulses of political life, resurrecting the ghosts of a past that should have taught us where the glorification of state violence, racial supremacy, and the crushing of dissent inevitably lead. Its legacy is written in the expansion of the carceral state, the staggering investment in prisons and punishment, the unleashing of masked agents of repression across the country, and the unapologetic embrace of a language of racial cleansing that strips entire populations of their humanity.For a fleeting moment, democracy may be able to breathe again. But breathing is not liberation, and an electoral victory is no substitute for dismantling the gangster capitalist order that breeds authoritarianism, commodifies every aspect of life, abandons conscience, and makes fascism an enduring possibility. The forces that produced Trump did not emerge overnight, nor will they disappear with an election. They are embedded in institutions that concentrate wealth and power, manufacture fear, and turn human suffering into a source of profit and political domination. Unless these structures are dismantled, the nightmare will return, perhaps wearing a different mask. Elections may interrupt the march toward authoritarianism, but they cannot abolish the conditions that make fascism possible. The task now is not to celebrate a temporary reprieve from political barbarism, but to turn this moment into a collective struggle to overthrow the machinery of capitalist oppression and build a democratic socialist society in which justice, equality, freedom, and human dignity are no longer empty promises betrayed by those in power, but the foundations of a radically different world.
― Henry Giroux
https://www.counterpunch.org/author/giroux-henry/
Again and again we Americans are told to distrust, to dehumanize, to divide us up into categories of judgment and ignorance, to abhor and fear difference and diversity, and to not recognize the holy and the sacred within each other. Whether by race or religion, ethnicity or immigration status, gender or sexual orientation, socioeconomic status or political beliefs, and on and on, any time that the narratives we embody within our hearts and minds hold other human beings with judgment and distain we are simply feeding and fueling all the separates rather than connects us. And that causes great harm to us all.
Coming out of a great deal of ancestral and cultural trauma, I was deeply disassociated, instinct injured, judgmental of myself and others, and disconnected from the wisdom of my heart and my holy essence. I felt largely separate from everything and everyone. As a child I had needed to disassociate to survive the violence within my childhood home.
Gratefully, I have now been on a profoundly healing and transformative path of awakening from my delusions for many years now. And today I can hold us all, at least most of the time, with compassion because I humbly know what it is like to be asleep and completely blind to all the illusions I was swimming in and believing were true and normal. At the same time, this does not mean that I will turn away or enable those who perpetrate so much harm and suffering onto other humans, nonhumans, and our planet.
Much of what is "normal" in America is not healthy, whole, or grounded in the awareness of the sacred and how it is that we are all interrelated, interconnected, and woven together as holy beings who matter. We all matter.
There is this continuum that I believe we humans are all are on with fear and separation and illusion on the one end and compassion, wisdom, and love on the other. And wherever we fall on this continuum is often impacted by how much we have absorbed and been impacted by what the amazing and wise author, poet, activist bell hooks refers to as imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
As more and more of us are committed to the individual and collective work of awakening and alleviating the suffering in our country, other nations, and across our Earth Mother, it is my deepest hope that we will be brave enough to role up our sleeves even higher as we pursue lifting the veils of our illusions in an ongoing way. May we stand with all those who embody integrity, authenticity, courage, compassion, wisdom, and consciousness of and commitment to a highest good for all of life everywhere. And may we work together to dismantle those systems and ideologies of separation, greed, hatred, and the many faces of violence and delusion.
I am moved to end by quoting part of James Talarico's acceptance speech on election night:
There is something broken in America. Our economic system is broken. Our political system is broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken. That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way.
My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas, and when I was little, he told me that we follow a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments, love God and love neighbor, because there is no love of God without love of neighbor.
Every single person bears the image of the sacred. Every single person is holy, not just my neighbor who looks like me, not just my neighbor who prays like me, not just my neighbor who votes like me. I am called to love all of my neighbors the way I love myself.
Because despite our differences, we all want the same things: a safe neighborhood; a good job; a high quality, well-funded public school; and the ability to see a doctor when we need one.
But the billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they want us at each other’s throats. They want us focused on how we’re different instead of on how we’re the same. They want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them.
The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom. The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided, because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power. We saw it in this race. We saw it in every billionaire-funded attack ad.
The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets. That they are defunding our schools, that they are gutting our healthcare, that they are raising taxes on all of us while they cut taxes for themselves.
It is the oldest strategy in the world, divide and conquer.
But tonight we sent a crystal-clear message to the people at the top. We will not be conquered. I think it’s safe to say that we are tired of being pitted against each other. We are tired of being told to hate each other.
It has been 10 years of this kind of politics, politics as blood sport, politics as trolling and owning, politics as professional wrestling.
It tears families apart. It ends friendships, and it leaves us all feeling terrible all the time. People across the political spectrum are hungry for a different kind of politics. Not a politics of hate, not a politics of fear, not a politics of division, but a politics of love.
My faith teaches me that love is the strongest force in the universe. Love is not passive. Love is not neutral. Love is not weak. Love requires that we stand between the bullies and the bullied. Love requires that we look evil in the eye and not blink. That kind of love has always been a threat to the powers that be. That kind of love is revolutionary. That kind of love is creative.
Hate is predictable. Hate is boring. Hate can’t lower our energy bills. Hate can’t teach a child to read. Hate can’t build a future. But what hate can’t do, love can.
Love can turn a student into a scholar. Love can turn a closet into a nursery. Love can turn an enemy into a friend. Love can turn a campaign into a movement. Love, love can heal what’s broken in America. We can’t defeat the politics of division with more division. We can’t win that game. We have to change the game.
In my experience, when you extend an open hand rather than a closed fist, you’ll be surprised by who takes that hand. We didn’t win this race by alienating our neighbors, or shaming our neighbors, or ridiculing our neighbors. We embodied a new kind of politics, a politics rooted in a deep love for our state, for our country, and most importantly, for all of our neighbors...
We must unrig this economic system that only benefits the top 1%. We must pass universal healthcare, so no one goes bankrupt just because they get sick. We must invest in our teachers and our students, so every underdog has a fighting chance. We must end these corrupt forever wars that are driving up prices and killing our great men and women in uniform.
And we must heal the deep spiritual corruption at the root of all of these crises. We must bridge the divides between us and repair the ties that bind us. We forged a new kind of politics here in the Lone Star State, an answer to this decade of division.
― James Talarico
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