All Is Not Well

Today, we are a collective of people who have been brainwashed to be enemies. A place where one church is being used to write policy. Where freedom of religion is being rebuffed, as the Republican Party wants sole possession of our souls, as simultaneously human rights are being eradicated. There is no mention of what is sacred, and yet, money is worshipped. There is now a fear to disagree, and yet, our freedom to speak, to protest are inalienable rights. So it is alarming that one man can seek to take them all away. Because of my progressive upbringing, I have many acute bouts of actuality, the feeling that I am in some kind of Orwellian twilight zone.

Tonight, I am sitting on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh in front of the NCSU campus. I sit and watch and an endless stream of America’s best and brightest young adults walk by. I fear for their futures. Will there be an America as we know it, or are we watching our country collapse into fascism? Will everything my dad believed in, the purpose and ideals of our nation, fail and fall to greedy men who also peddle an extremist religious doctrine, or can we save her from ruin? Will our country unexpectedly topple from the inside out? And will we, will we realize the exact moment that our democracy dies?

The fabric of our country is broken. Not only is democracy dying, but also our relationships. I am a patriotic American who cries when “The Star-Spangled Banner” plays, I get cold chills looking over the Blue Ridge Mountains, I am a caring and responsible citizen, and yet, I am now considered the enemy, because I am a Democrat. I have friends who disagree with me, there is a rift now between us. My dad, a lifetime Democrat, had best friends who were Republicans. They never even considered each other adversaries. It was more like “I like tea, they like coffee.” But today, there is this feeling that if Trump went rogue and started rounding opposition to deliver to camps, my friends on the other side would not save me. This is so hard for me to reconcile. Just imagine this. Americans choosing a politician over years of friendship, to the point of infringement and danger. For the first time, I have stepped away from old friends. I have realized our morals and values have drifted apart. We live in two different Americas. I decided to stay with what I know, what I learned at my parents’ dinner table. I pray these friends will have some kind of stark reckoning, but I am an American, not a Fox News follower. I hope at some point, they miss me, but if they don’t, I am satisfied in knowing I don’t fall for conspiracy theories, and fascist ideals. I still believe in the America my dad believed in and fought for.

So whether it is today or tomorrow, we all must choose the kind of country we want to live in. We can live in a darkness that follows evil by the coattails. We can crave hate and violence. We can celebrate our own ignorance. We can create a God that is much the same. We can gaze out over smokestacks and dead deer, surrounded by tree trunks, and murky water with Cyanobacteria. We can bring hungry children into a dead world and watch them starve with fascination and pat ourselves on our Christian backs, or we can revere great minds, brave curiosity, depth of soul, and the bottomless web of good hearts. We can call Earth sacred. We can choose to be good and loving parents, and we can love all life as if it is our own. We can paint the world in joy. And gaze at our lives as a momentary heaven, because we desire to be sacred. We can alter the madness of who we have become by looking into our souls and searching for what is true. And then living it.

As despondent as I am, and as heartbroken as I feel, I believe a great power lures us towards love. Many fight it with ignorance and high tech weapons. But love is a verb that comes from our disheveled past. Only we can straighten out the mess we have made. First, we must reconcile our failures, and then we must chart a new path into an already manufactured and unruly wilderness and begin again to tend it like a garden. Democracy waits for us. God waits for us, not in heaven, but here and now. I wait, too. The door is open, please refuse to close it. Everything. Everything is the longing of the heart, the yearning of a divine power that we feel but cannot see, and it exists inside of me, inside of you, we are merely…tangled up in blue.

• Patty Brown

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.”

• Pema Chödrön