Let's start here.
We voted for him, white America.
The Klan is on the march. People are tagging buildings with swastikas. Nonwhite children are being bullied. Churches are being desecrated.
It's been four days.
Those people count you as allies. Are you? Are we?
Those of us who elected him spoke of Christ when they did so, but that America does not know Christ. It knows power. It is supporting centuries of hate to preserve what it believes it has a divine right to.
That America declared its hatred for my non-white friends, my women friends, my gay friends and bi friends and trans friends. It mocked my disabled friends. It pointed guns at my black friends and Muslim friends. Some of it pointed guns at our own children, and the rest shuffled their feet around a bit and looked down at their shoes and shrugged.
That America turned Christ's name into a bumper sticker. It turned the implement of his torture and murder into a rallying symbol for more torture and murder. It turned a savior into an inspiration-porn mascot for its Sunday stage shows.
It sacralized emotional moments wrought by painstakingly-orchestrated "worship experiences" and ignored the cries of the doomed. It stood on the backs of the disenfranchised and sang songs of praise for how it had been blessed.
In short, it built a nation and a church on white cishet supremacy and misogyny. Those things are in its DNA. I knew it was there and I knew it was bad, but I didn't comprehend its full scale and enormity until this year.
This is not of Christ. He warned us about power and refused it for himself. He told us to take up our crosses and follow him. We invented theological and ideological purity tests instead.
I am talking to you now, white America. Not to those we've hurt with our push-button vengeance-at-a-distance. If they are reading this, undoubtedly they feel like I've wandered into a funeral wearing Poirot cosplay and announcing that zhere is a DEAD person een zees room.
I'm talking to you because you need to hear it from someone who looks and sounds like you, because we are dogshit at listening to them. I include myself in that shame.
So I figure the least I can do to make it up to them is to join them in their suffering and fear, and try to figure out how to lend my advantages to them. I hope you will too.
The Serenity Prayer is inaccurately named. It is also a prayer for the wisdom to know when to set your serenity aside so that you may help bear others' burdens. A plea for the courage to respond to that call.
I haven't done enough. And I'm not sure what I'm going to do now, but I'm starting by plugging in where I can. I'm cashing in my serenity. Because this year was a master class in demonstrating how little of it people have who do not look like me.
The America that raised me told me that it was blue oxen and baseball. The other America told me of firehoses and money and murder. I was scared of their stories, but I am tired of my delusions.
I do not know what to do with this America. Pledge allegiance? Hardly.
But I do know this: My despair is becoming resentment, and that resentment will become fuel, and if my brothers and sisters do not live in the America I was told about, then I will try to help them build it.
With or without you, I and my wife and children will help them build it. If they will have us.
I hope we do it with you, white America. Your country needs you. Come help me figure out how to help.
If you live in central Arkansas and are afraid, @ me on Twitter and I'll send you my contact information. I'll do what I can.