America’s Suicide Note

The following piece was originally published November 9, 2016, in the aftermath of the election of the first fascist president of the United States. It has been preserved here as the original page on which I posted it is no longer public.

It is official.

Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States of America.

As well, the Republican party he is now leader of has been elected to a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

I feel like I just watched my home country swallow the last morphine tablet necessary to reach a fatal dose. Already, the drugs are kicking in. Trump has collected a gaggle of corporate lobbyists to help him run his future regime. He has hired staffers with a history of voter fraud. One of Trump’s reality show lackeys is even now already talking publicly about his “enemies list.”

As an American living overseas, I have always identified as an immigrant, not an expat. While my experience in Finland has been nowhere near as hard as what people of color experience, I felt that as the grandson of immigrants myself it was important to stand with and identify with those living that experience both here and abroad, and to make plain I had no intention of returning, that I wanted to stay.

Today though, is the first day I can unironically say I feel like a refugee. Today is a day more than ever before where I am truly afraid at the very thought I might ever be forced to return to my homeland. To a land that has today categorically and stated with a clear majority voice that if you are black, gay, trans, Jewish, poor, sick, mentally ill, an immigrant, a woman, or in any way other than a pure white strongman, you are less than human. And as someone who is indeed some of those things, and who loves and cherishes so many people in my life who fall in those categories, this is nothing less than a horror.

This is a black day for the poor and huddled masses. Freedom, in a paroxysm of rage and hatred, has with gleeful shouts voted itself away.

It is here that I should be expected to point out that a certain German dictator was democratically elected, but this is an unfair comparison. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party gained only a minority of the vote, gaining the rest of their control through other means once established as a national party.

Donald Trump has been elected with a clear majority, and his party as well as been given a majority in both houses of Congress. White America has spoken in a loud and clear majority voice that this is what they want: a tyrant. They have gleefully supported a campaign of racism, sexism, intolerance, and autocracy.

And if you are a part of that? If you cast your lot in with a man who has declared open war on every principle of a free and open society? If you walked into the voting booth and tossed down one more suicide pill into America’s gullet? May God have mercy upon your soul.

Because I won’t.

Today was a test, and you have failed it. You have failed your country, you have failed your God, you have failed every disadvantaged and disenfranchised voice in this nation, and you have failed me and everyone I love.

I won’t easily forget that. I won’t easily forgive. How could I? What apology could possibly make up for being one of the knives in democracy’s back?

I hear you now, already, rushing to object. To wring hands about “respecting differences” and how “divided” we are, to decry “political correctness” and see my words as one more excuse to paint yourselves as the victims.

But you are not the victims today. You are the perpetrators. You who stand there with blood still dripping from your steely knives. With every envelope, every slip of paper, every punched card and tap of a touchscreen, you have made it clear what you think of me and mine.

This is no mere “difference of opinion.” In one terrible act you have made it plain that you do not possess the full compassion which should be expected of each and every one of us as human beings. That you do not believe in equality of rights, of opportunity, or even in basic decency to all mankind. You have shown by your action that what human love you possess, what caring you possess, is selective at best. That at best, you do not care for the plight of me and mine, at worst, you see as an object of hatred and scorn.

How can I look at you the same again? How can I call you friend, or family, let alone loved one?

My whole life I have watched this country fulfill every moment of cynicism I have leveled at it, watched it surprise and disappoint me year after year, but this? This was the one moment that I hoped and prayed that it couldn’t. That even America couldn’t possibly go this far. I even sought to kindle a kind of foolish optimism, that this was merely the last shouting remains of a dying and ugly side of our history.

But hearts are made to be broken. And today, like Kurt Vonnegut before me, I once again find myself a man without a country.

It is customary to say a few parting words for the deceased, but a country is no mere body to be placed in the ground. My friends and loved ones back home still have to live through whatever nightmare is to come, whether petty or apocalyptic.

So I will not say, as I am tempted to, “America, may you Rest in Peace,” but instead offer another prayer, so familiar to the one I have often intoned in times of fear and despair:

Father in Heaven, We the People of the United States of America, beseech thee:

Give us this day and each day to come our daily bread, as the times ahead grow lean.

Forgive us our sins, as our nation once forgave those who sinned against us.

Lead us away from the temptation of hatred and violence,

But deliver us from evil.

For we are a nation under Mammon, divided, with no liberty or justice for many.

May you have mercy on our souls.

Goodnight America.