Seems like fear has settled over us like a fine, poisoned drizzle. The news, social media, talk shows are like crop dusters spraying ways for us to be afraid and ways to hate each other. The Atlantic cover art shows Trump driving a circus wagon with an elephant trapped, an image echoing the Bradbury novel, Something Wicked this Way Comes.
Memes reinforce that message. Cut off friends. Cut off family. Divorce your spouse. If they voted for Trump.
But some are turning to creation for courage and solace. With a big smile, next to a horse, writer Pam Houston says, “It is very important to do things that comfort you. For me that is hugging horses and dogs. It sounds silly but that is the only way to balance the fear. Fear for myself, yes, but even more fear for the people I love. Rearrange your priorities so you have access to whatever thing that is. Ocean. Chocolate. Flowers. Books.”
This morning, a friend texted how she couldn’t understand how America could elect a bully like Trump. I replied, “Maybe do some research into why we elected him. Maybe do it outside mainstream media. I don’t care to get in this discussion with you. I don’t have the mind or heart for it. And fear our conversation would devolve into argument. I value our friendship. I feel for how upset you are.”
We went on to talk about the good things in our lives. We both received a lift of joy.
I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.
If you’d like to hear me read this on WNIJ, click here.
There are so many ways I could go as far as elaborating on this perspective. First let me talk about this business of political discussions. I’m also trying to avoid talking about the election. Friends are upset, grieving, afraid. And these friends are dear to me. I have told Facebook that I want to see less of political posts that leave me silently arguing, knowing I don’t have the chops to get tangled in a discussion.
And I am relieved. I was working on hunkering down, in ways Pam Houston talks about, if Kamala got elected. And I thought for sure Kamala would be. I envisioned my right to free speech taken away. My wild imagination imagined the Feds showing at our door because I have been outspoken about immigrants and have publicly protested renewables in our county. Biden talked about how Trump voters are terrorists. I have a rough draft sitting on my computer/cloud about people who join one of those groups that only follows their local Sheriff’s authority. It is a sequel to my novel The River Caught Sunlight and I am considering revising it and posting it here for paid subscribers. But will I be tracked for doing research, or posting it? I also hesitate because there’s enough fear and animosity towards rural people, that I don’t want to enflame it. I am hopeful Trump will cut back on the government’s nosiness.
Anyone who defies the Narrative can be called a terrorist, so anyone can be arrested on suspicion of terrorism, and the expensive law fare begins. What’s scary is the Feds have the tools to watch us because if I can talk about windows and receive ads from window replacement companies in my email, the Feds have the capability to see what I’m saying on line.
Trump is right when he says, “If they come after me, they’ll come after you.” Like Houston I have worked hard at resisting my fear by spending time with the horse, walking down the road, and tossing the ball for the dog. I too eat chocolate and enjoy a scoop of ice cream with Bruce regularly. When I walk, I bring my mind back to “Thank you Lord” because the fields and trees and farms and sky are whole. But even now I have to resist the fear that wakes me up, whispering, “This is the last good holiday season. The terrible beast slouching, is nearly here.” I am gobsmacked by how President Biden and NATO are playing footsie with Putin and nuclear war. I mutter Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God have mercy. Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world have mercy. “Takes away the sin of the world.” Well, that’s something to contemplate.
The protests have started. Trump’s potential cabinet appointees have received bomb and swatting threats. Frank Schaeffer, the writer I promoted back in the day, and subject of my novel The River Caught Sunlight, just called for humility in the wake of this election, which surprised me because I have seen so little self-examination on the Democrat side of things. In What Now? on his Substack It Has to Be Said, he says, “Maybe we should step back and say, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Instead of following the path of hubris ourselves, let’s for a minute in humility reconsider our own certainties. And I’m not telling you what those certainties should be. That would be an act of hubris. But I’m telling you that if this loss does not call for a reconsideration of the certainties of the left, then we are as stupid as the hubristic right who have just won the election. So what to do?” He goes on to consider the words of Jesus about the first being last and the last being first, that history bends toward the humble.
Examining those certainties with an open heart, might be a good exercise and might actually heal the divides between people, more than cutting off people who see things differently. We are all Americans.
But I was dismayed by the comments under his post and am dismayed to see what people are posting on Facebook about cutting people off if they voted for Trump.
A former teacher and poet, the kind whose poems show up in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, says she knows authoritarian governments from her travels to South America and that Trump will be authoritarian. She warned her friends to be careful who they befriend, and watchful because the government will come for them. As I said above this has been my fear. Has she not seen the lawfare against Trump and others like the pro-life protestor who opened the door to an FBI swat team? Has she not seen how Trump aims to cut back government beauracracy? How the Supreme Court has made the rules and regulations brought into play from the Chevron decision null and void? So hopefully the government will have less involvement in our private lives. What’s scary is the feds have the tools to listen in. (I can talk about installing windows and see ads in my email for windows.)
I refrain from saying anything, though I wake up thinking of my reply: Really? You weren’t awake during Covid where they locked us down, except for the George Floyd riots? You haven’t read how the federal government pressured Twitter and Facebook to silence doctors who questioned the narrative that masks and social distancing were effective? You don’t remember how the untested jab was forced on people or they’d lose their job? Or people telling me to take the vaccine to protect them, when it did not protect them or me. These same people chant “my body my choice” when it comes to “reproductive rights” when once a child is conceived it’s no longer just her body. And the lies by President Biden that it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated when the vaccine didn’t prevent people from getting the illness, nor did it stop the spread. Does she not see how no one voted for Kamala to be the candidate for president or that Biden is incapable of running the country?
I refrain from speaking on Facebook because others will jump in with insults and alternative perspectives. My blood pressure rises. There’s no convincing. No conversation. It’s worthless stress. I don’t feel like taking my attention off the goodness of the world. I want to be quiet enough to see how the sky changes day by day and how the horse stands by the door asking for hay cubes. Right now, these days, I’m not so obsessed with keeping track the powers running the country. I refrain because there’s so much more to friendship than who a person voted for, than even the political narrative with which we cloak themselves.
A good friend, whose politics and syncretistic Christianity, where he tries to weave other faith traditions that hold truth, into his faith in Jesus is very different than mine sent a message asking Did you vote for Trump? “Yes. I did.” “I love you. You’re my internet mom.”
I waited a week to respond, but when we finally talked it got ugly fast. I thought he wanted to hear why I voted for Trump. But it devolved to an argument. We have very different sources of information with regards to what’s going on in the culture. He accused me of being in too thick a conservative bubble but stopped short of saying, “You watch too much Fox news.” (I don’t watch it at all.) And would have done better to encourage him to check out Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger or Bari Weiss. He started to play therapist with me. I felt like I was walking through two feet of water. Well actually it felt like molasses. I told him to cut it out and said I wanted to watch my show: The Golden Bachelorette.
I wondered if I should follow Paul’s advice when he says “If anyone does not obey what we say in this letter, take note of that person, have nothing to do with him that he may be ashamed. Do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother” (2 Thessalonians 3: 14 – 15). Because that feeling of walking in molasses, that feeling of disorientation, that being told who I am without my saying, was a game that friends don’t play with each other. But backing away from a person is serious business, especially since I know how it feels when people walk away from me.
There is wisdom in Paul’s saying, do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother because those ties with God’s people are familial ties. I have been so schooled in making nice that it’s not easy to “warn” someone. It’s easier to simply back away than state what has gone awry in the friendship as I see it. It’s so easy to play the judge, to try to convict someone of sin when that is not our role, unless God and much prayer and self-examination comes first. Martin Luther King in Letter From Birmingham Jail urged his fellow protestors to do this hard work of looking at yourself.
But the next morning my friend gave shout saying his wife scolded him for the conversation. We talked some more about our views, and he said I could share our interchange. Our friendship goes back nearly ten years. I hated that he brought up politics because we’ve avoided our ideologies and been able to pray together on Zoom off and on for quite some time. He has taught me how to pray for the world and has a practical heart for the poor.
I told a different intellectual friend on Facebook. “I’ll leave you be” when I had no more to say in our conversation. I felt like I was intellectually over my head, so I was aiming to bow out. He thought I was abandoning him. “No. No,” I said. “I just wanted to leave the discussion. That’s all.” He came over to one of my posts and said he’d be crushed if I left which set me back on how careful a person has to be with people’s hearts, even on Facebook.
Like Houston who talks about drawing close to the created world, I’ve been using my walks–both the long walks down the road and the short potty breaks with the dogs to become grounded in the present, in God’s good creation that is living and active. Since this post has gone on long enough, you’ll have to wait until next week to hear about how my sense of God’s good creation is being deepened by a class I’m taking with Paul Kingsnorth. But in the meantime, I’m curious about how you are coping with the fear, how are you finding ways to cultivate peace?
If you’d like to subscribe to these essays, feel free to come over to Katie’s Ground.