I still can’t believe we beat him.
It’s coming at me in waves.
I keep relaxing a little more each time I think about it, as though I’m lying down sinking further and further into an impossibly soft mattress after not lying down at all for 4 years. I think many Americans feel the same.
Oh, Donald Trump is still in office and there’s no end to the mischief he can get into. He’s filing lawsuits right and left, all of which have been dismissed so far because there hasn’t been a shred of evidence presented. His most sensible followers are demanding we give him time to come to the realization that he’s finished, gently. These are the same people who said “F*ck your feelings” and “make liberals cry again” for four years. His more delusional followers, meanwhile are insisting that he’s right, that he’s going to win the election somehow, that this is all a vast left-wing conspiracy as if Joe Biden were remotely left-wing. America doesn’t have a left wing. We have a Far Right and a Center Right. Biden is Center Right.
I see these people on social media, calling this Trump’s “Lepanto Hour” and demanding that we pray prayers to “bind demons” to do their bidding which is sorcery and not prayer. I see them in videos, waving their hands and carrying on in tongues.
It’s not prayer, not really. They’re not humbly lifting their hearts and petitions to God, trusting in His will and providence and asking what He would have them do; they’re just trying to manipulate events to their advantage by bossing God around. I went to Franciscan University. I know all about such prayers. It doesn’t matter how many times you babble “Jesus Jesus shundadditty da da da da Jesus Jesus shadadadadada Jesus Jesus” if you’re not actually paying attention to Jesus, just ordering Him around.
Maybe these people will go on being in denial and delusion forever. Maybe they’ll end up like the dwarves in The Last Battle, sitting in a stable, eating manure and saying “The dwarfs are for the dwarfs” for all eternity.
I always hated that book. I loved the other Narnia books when I was a little girl; I read the paperbacks until they fell apart in my hands, but I hated that one and only read it once. I hated what happened to Susan, and I hated that that meant Narnia was gone forever. I didn’t want Narnia to be over, and all its characters in Heaven with Aslan. I wanted it to be a real place you could go to. I wanted to believe that I could go there, and run away from stuffy Aslan if he tried to send me back.
I have always believed that better worlds are possible.
I still do.
This is why I despise Republicans in general. This is why I’m not keen on Democrats either. I look at Trump and I see someone who doesn’t believe the world outside of his own immediate wants is real. I look at the things that Biden wants to do and I say “that’s not enough. Change more. Do more. More people need help and you could do it if you just had an imagination.”
I look at the people who tell me I must vote Republican or face eternal punishment, despite the Church not saying that at all, because republicans give lip service to wanting to make abortion illegal. And I want to shake them. That’s not enough. It’s not anything like enough and indeed it’s not even a start. The Nazis banned abortion on pain of death, at least for Aryan women. Stalin banned abortion entirely. It doesn’t make them good people. Trump didn’t even ban abortion. In fact, the Heritage Foundation is keeping track and noticed that abortion rates began to bounce up for the first time since Reagan when Trump was in office. And they’re through the roof now, thanks to his botching of the pandemic. We won’t know the total toll for some time, but I predict it will be staggering.
He’s responsible for the deaths of these children, and so are his supporters. The pro-life movement didn’t save them. It killed them, because it focuses on legal abolition and that won’t work for something like abortion. Abortion is horrendous, tragic, unacceptable violence, but it exists as a symptom of previous violence. It is, as my friend recently put it on Twitter, oppression redistributed. We’re never, ever going to stop it merely by making it illegal. That’s been a grift and a confidence game from the beginning. We have to have the courage to address that oppression, and to believe that a better world is possible, and to fight for that better world. That better world is our responsibility.
Maybe that’s why I’m still a Christian, even after everything I’ve been through at the hands of Christians. I have this dreadful optimism that a better world is possible, and this childish tenacity that tells me I need to make it so. I mustn’t grow up and become mature and accept the fatalism of sensible people. I have to hope and work toward that hope. I insist on hope. I demand hope. I demand that the people at the Friendship Room find a way to keep the homeless alive during the pandemic. I demand that we address the problem of homelessness and make it stop so they don’t have to do this again, and while we’re addressing it from the top we go down and help the actual homeless however we can. I demand that we fight to stop the abuse so rampant in our Church, and I demand that while we’re fighting to dismantle it from the top we also stay down at the bottom with the victims, listening to them, uplifting their voices and helping them. I demand we do the same for victims of racism and police brutality, and every other victim of oppression.
I’m not very powerful. I’m a chronically ill woman with a low income and no car, in a pandemic. I’m next door to helpless, most of the time. So I try to do small things whenever I can, and I try to repent the thousand times I realize I’ve failed to do small things well, and I talk about small things so other people can do them. I refused to give up hope that in doing so, we might all accomplish very great things. I believe that’s the work that Christianity demands of me. I’m not very good at it.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, I see Jesus, refusing to be crowned an earthly king, walking around His homeland speaking to whoever had ears to hear, healing the sick and feeding the multitude that forgot to pack a lunch. I hear Him telling me that the Kingdom, that world I long for, is not dead and all its citizens gone away; it is at hand, and I can live there. I hear Him say “the poor You will always have with you, but Me you will not always have with you.” I hear that not as a condemnation or permission to stop fighting, but as a reminder of where He is to be found. The poor are here, and we find Jesus hiding among Him. They suffer all the time, but our chance to comfort Him, speak out for Him, defend Him and help Him is fleeting. We have to get to work. There’s no time to lose. The poor are always suffering but we can’t miss our window. And again and again He’ll slip through our fingers, so we’ll have to go and help Him again. And so on until His Kingdom comes. It’s already here in one sense because we are His subjects and we’re trying to live it. In another, it is coming into the world and I can’t control that.
He’s not somebody I can bark at and order around in tongues or any other way. I can’t bind demons to make him work a miracle.
He’s not somebody who belongs to a political party. Both political parties are pretty rotten. It’s up to our individual consciences to discern who’s likely to kill the most people this time around and vote against that candidate. This time around, I think the choice was obvious.
This time around, I got my choice. I think things will get a little easier now. I think fewer people are going to die, and there will be more opportunity to do somebody good.
And that’s why I’m so relieved, so happy, as I sink into the realization that Donald Trump has been defeated and all his disciples’ babbling and magic didn’t work. The nonsense didn’t work. The superstition didn’t work. God doesn’t belong to them. They can go on with their delusions forever, it doesn’t matter. We beat the fascist and elected the man who was just okay.
It will be a little bit easier to work towards a better world now. The world doesn’t seem quite so bleak and horrible as it did before.
It’s time to get off this down mattress and get to work, and that feels wonderful.
Image via Pixabay.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross.
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