Not today

Pure rage is all I've got

Warning right at the top, this post will not be kind, compassionate, tolerant, or hopeful. I will return to those things, rest assured, mainly because not doing so would hand everyone I despise right now more reasons to play the persecuted victim, the sanctimonious saint, and to never to look at themselves in the mirror. Today, I will not bleep out the curse words, and I will not be a Very Good Christian.

Not today.

Speaking of Good Christians, slow clap. Your smug, entitled, self-righteous, narcissistic, ignorant, brainwashed, judgmental, obtuseness has brought history’s greatest democratic experiment to the brink of destruction. If not certain collapse. The achievement is truly astonishing, and given some objectivity in this situation, I might begrudgingly respect what you’ve managed to do here.

But not today.

You believe in lies. You are liars. And I’m not just talking about election denial and anti-science and any number of Kool-Aid pitchers you’ve water-boarded yourself with.

I’m talking about the lie that God is so tiny you can have him all to yourself. That America is. I’m talking about the propaganda that a collection of largely unknown ancient writers somehow captured the God of an entire universe they didn’t even know existed completely and perfectly and clearly for all time. And that that book is somehow dictating that you goose-step behind a mad man in the era of the Hubble telescope. The delusion that all of this is so easy and certain and paint-by-numbers and we can cheat death and pain through clenched-butt-cheeks of control and that He Alone Can Fix It.

You are liars, and I know that for a fact because I have dared to consider it for more than a few seconds. You have always preferred I keep those thoughts to myself.

Not today.

If you want to construct empires of illusion and condominiums built on sand, that’s your choice. This is still a free country, for now, despite your best efforts. If you want to wall yourself off and be a real live cult over there on a compound, have at it.

But don’t deposit your toxic shit in my house. I have purposefully moved out of yours because of the stench. I have breathed the fresh air of freedom and am not buying what you’re selling. I have seen the ingredients and know it’s 100% snake oil and 0% gospel. Don’t force it on me like the rapist you have rallied behind.

Not today.

81 percent. EIGHTY ONE FUCKING PERCENT. Of white evangelicals STILL voted for this deranged, dumbass, depraved, demented demon. “Because abortion.” Fuck your pathetic, made-up, morally simplistic, manipulative, dishonest litmus tests that allow you to pat yourselves on the back and avoid your own fear and failure and take a nap in your spiritual easy chairs, watching your North Korean style TV, without ever using your damn brains or searching your damn hearts.

You have literally empowered the type of man who necessitates so many abortions rather than doing anything meaningful for the unborn babies you claim to love well enough to excuse you from considering fully formed human beings, who annoyingly refuse to stay in utero. And anyway, there are more abortions now than there were before you subjected us to this conduit of catastrophic cowardice that you think will save you.

He won’t save you.

Not today.

Not ever. Your complicity with evil has had an epic run, I’ll grant you that. You’ve somehow survived the scandals of slavery and lynching and segregation and systemic abuse, without considering for even a millisecond that you might not be the good guys in this story. Long enough for you to construct impressive edifices and write saccharine fairy tales and paint beautiful, impressionistic portraits of yourself.

But you are on your way out, mark my words. Your movement is dying, choking on its own vomit, suffocating in its own solipsism and sophistry and stupidity.

But not today.

So we all will pay. You will, too. You’ll pay with your own freedom and your own money and your own health and maybe even your own lives. When you flick a cigarette out your car window onto dry grasslands, you don’t choreograph the flames. Make no mistake, you own them, they are yours. But they cannot be stage-managed like your tent revivals and your megachurch-performance-art and your women. They will burn down your house, same as mine.

But not today.

Today you ride high and mighty.

I wrote last week that Democracy is Love. I wrote out of more hope and grace and expansive heart than I have now, but not out of naivety. I knew this could happen. And I preemptively, stubbornly believed. I will always believe. And as much hate and anger and violence as democracy can feature, as a system, democracy is indeed an expression of love. Of trust. Of a commitment to the best bad option of letting go.

I love you to the extent that I will live with your choices. You won’t see me claiming fraud¹ or spreading lies or rioting or destroying or egging on a bully in my rage. Not like you. I will have my temper tantrum here, on this page, as is still my right, and in the quiet of my room. I will be dignified and civilized out there in a world of people who are neither.

But not today.

Today I can’t leave my room. Because I can’t be dignified and civilized.

I love you to the extent that I would still die to safeguard your choices, no matter what it means for me. I will turn the other cheek and turn back to grace and turn around from this rage toward more useful things. I will probably apologize for the vitriol I’m spewing here.

But not today.

Today, there is only rage.

Rage born of the humiliation and self-negating agony that you have once again chosen a rapist over a good-faith woman. It feels like another rape, in my soul, it does. I am violated and eviscerated, shaking and bleeding.

But then, you have consistently chosen abusive men over good women. You have chosen microscopic embryos over our robust, full, boisterous lives. You have subjugated and gaslit and brainwashed us into thinking God made us to be playthings and dishwashers and chattel. Potluck queens with no crowns but your empty, imprisoning praise for accepting our lot.

Some of us know better. And you hate us the very most. You want us to shut up and sit down.

Well. Not today.

You have consistently chosen doctrine over people, nebulous spirit over flesh and blood, rigid rules over guiding lights, certainty over community, heaven over earth, hell over hope, fear over faith.

Autocracy over democracy.

Because democracy IS love. And you have no love. You are clanging cymbals and off-key songs and fingernails scratching out Bible verses on a chalkboard. My ears are damaged from the decades I spent listening to you. My heart aches at how drastically you have missed the point. You’re not even close anymore. You’re so far away you think you’ve arrived.

You will never arrive. Not like this.

Not today.

I don’t think I can do anything to get through to most of you. But dammit if I don’t spend every day of the rest of my life deflecting your bullets and exposing your bullshit to as many as I can, to point them towards the exits with light-up wands as this plane crashes.

Ultimately, though, my efforts are nothing compared to what you have done to yourselves. Jesus said that whoever tries to keep his life will lose it. And your tight, stifling, gasping, greedy death-grip ensures your defeat.

But enjoy today. You’ve earned it.

1. Funny how all the fraud has disappeared in an instant. Huh.