![\"protest-pic\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/429\/2016\/11\/protest-pic.jpg\")
<\/a>President Elect Donald Trump. It will take a long time for that to sink in. So, where do we go from here?<\/p>\nWe are being called to heal our nation and unite. The United States is clearly divided, but I\u2019m suspicious about those calls. After 9\/11, we knew that our nation needed to heal. But we never healed from the wounds of 9\/11. No one taught us how to heal. So instead of healing, we acted out our pain through acts of revenge. And we\u2019ve been seeking vengeance<\/a> ever since, inflicting terror in the Middle East in the tragically ironic \u201cWar on Terror.\u201d<\/p>\n If you are like me and feeling a deep sense of pain by the result of Tuesday\u2019s election, acting out that pain with violence is understandable. After all, it\u2019s what we did after 9\/11.<\/p>\n But if you do that, you are unlikely to heal. Many in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, have taken to the streets to protest president elect Donald Trump. I appreciate those protests, especially since Trump lost the popular vote. Tragically, a few rioters have acted violently, causing more than $1 million<\/a> in damage to local businesses. This violence isn\u2019t holy. It hurts others and only scratches at our wounds. It never leads to healing.<\/p>\n The way to healing our pain is not through violence, but through expressing our pain. Many people have taken to Facebook to lament. That\u2019s good. But an even better way to heal is to talk about our pain, disappointment, and anger with a trusted friend, pastor, or therapist.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a book in the Bible called the Psalms. It expresses all kinds of raw emotions \u2013 anger, resentment, hatred, lament, and bitterness. Why? Because the psalmist knew that burying those emotions doesn\u2019t lead to healing. Denying that we have those emotions doesn\u2019t help, either. The only way to heal is to go through those emotions by talking them out with someone we trust \u2013 someone who will receive our emotions with compassion. When we talk out our emotions, we are less likely to act them out by channeling our violence upon another.<\/p>\n The Psalms are public displays of holy protests. Like the prophets, the Psalms look at the political violence, oppression, and divisiveness in the world and protest against them. The Psalms are holy protests because they claim that there\u2019s something deeply wrong in the world. It\u2019s important that we protest publicly, too, otherwise we become numb and cynical. We begin to think that this is just how the world is.<\/p>\n The flip side of talking is listening. Progressives, like myself, often come to the Psalms with a sense of judgment. We wonder, \u201cHow could the Psalms be so angry, even express desires for violence?\u201d Well, I think we can now empathize with the psalmist. Part of the importance of empathy is that it creates the ability to listen with a non-judgmental spirit. Empathy receives what others have to say and normalizes the human emotions. \u201cOh, you are angry and resentful? And part of you wants to act out in violence against your enemies? Yep, that\u2019s human. It\u2019s normal. Tell me more about\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n The more we talk about our pain and disappointment with someone who can receive it with compassion, the less power it has over us and the more energy we can spend making the world a better place.<\/p>\n Since early on Wednesday morning, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other politicians have called us to unite behind our president elect. Isn\u2019t that great? A call to bipartisan unity. No, it\u2019s not great.<\/p>\n If president Trump is like candidate Trump and channels hatred against minority groups, that is not okay. Part of healing as a nation is to protest by naming that fact.<\/p>\n Unity is a strange thing. We usually think unity is good, but Trump actually ran his campaign on creating unity. He wanted his supporters, largely white people, to unite against minority groups \u2013 Latinos, Muslims, African Americans, LGBTQ, women, and the disabled. That\u2019s the kind of unity that candidate Trump called us to. And many of his supporters have united behind his violent rhetoric. Lilly Workneh, Black Voices Senior Editor at the Huffington Post, writes<\/a>,<\/p>\n Since Tuesday, people from all types of communities \u2013 black, Latino, Muslim, Jewish, Asian, queer people, women \u2013 have been physically harmed, slandered with hate speech or been the targets of racist graffiti.<\/em><\/p>\n So, do not call me to unite behind Donald Trump. I will resist his policies for as long as he seeks to channel cultural hatred against his chosen scapegoats.<\/p>\n President elect Trump has a long way to go before he can earn our trust. Maybe some of my friends are right. Maybe candidate Trump lied throughout his campaign because he thought it was the only way he could be elected. Maybe he totally fooled his supporters and his detractors. Maybe he will stop the 3:30 am tweets of revenge. Maybe he will be a president of reconciliation. If so, it\u2019s imperative that he tells his supporters who are acting out violent racism<\/a> to stop. It will be difficult for him to do that, since candidate Trump normalized such racism.<\/p>\n But I\u2019m hopeful that most Trump supporters didn\u2019t vote for him because of racist motivations. They voted for him because they feel a deep sense of shame that he tapped into. There is classism in the United States and, unfortunately, Hillary Clinton was the poster child of that classism.<\/p>\n Bernie Sanders tapped into that sense of shame and sought to heal it in a much more productive way than Trump\u2019s method of scapegoating. Bernie named the truth that we don\u2019t live in a meritocracy. The American Dream, where anyone can simply work hard and get ahead, doesn\u2019t exist. It never did. And many who voted for Trump know it because they live it every day. The Left would do well to take Sanders as a model moving forward. As progressive Rabbi Michael Lerner recently wrote<\/a> in the New York Times,<\/p>\n Democrats need to become as conscious and articulate about the suffering caused by classism as we are about other forms of suffering. We need to reach out to Trump voters in a spirit of empathy and contrition. Only then can we help working people understand that they do not live in a meritocracy, that their intuition that the system is rigged is correct (but it is not by those whom they had been taught to blame) and that their pain and rage is legitimate.<\/em><\/p>\n But Trump also has work to do. If he seeks to affect economic change that will address the classism within our country, I\u2019ll unite behind those policy changes. But I don\u2019t trust him. He has a life-long pattern of justifying revenge and scapegoating<\/a>. Trump is a human being, of course. He\u2019s not evil. There is goodness within him and he needs that goodness reflected back to him. But make no mistake, his rhetoric and the scapegoating policies that he promised during his campaign were divisive and in no way lead to the unity so many of us want. We must continue with public displays of holy protest because true unity is radically different from Trump\u2019s campaign promises. It will come only when we stand united for a world where there are no scapegoats.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Image: Anti-Trump Protest, Wikimedia<\/a>, Creative Commons License, Public Domain.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President Elect Donald Trump. It will take a long time for that to sink in. So, where do we go from here? We are being called to heal our nation and unite. The United States is clearly divided, but I\u2019m suspicious about those calls. After 9\/11, we knew that our nation needed to heal. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1651,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nHow to Heal \u2013 Holy Protest<\/strong><\/h3>\n
A Call to False Unity<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Beyond Shame and Classism<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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