A Cruel Reckoning

I did not want to write these words. What I’ve wanted since midnight Election Day is simply to stay in bed with the covers pulled up to my ears, mourning the death of the very idea of what it means to be an American.

Now we are strangers in a strange land. As is said about bankruptcy, it happened gradually at first, then all at once. The vaunted American precepts of freedom, inclusivity, and big-hearted optimism have been rendered in a single stroke neither recognizable nor even familiar.

I was a child of the ‘60s who thought when our generation rises to positions of responsibility and influence in the world, we will banish forever the old malignancies, the old contagions: xenophobia, misogyny, kleptocracy. But this election has instead confirmed what we’d already begun to suspect, that malice and cruelty, racism, and narrow self-interest have always lain dormant in the body politic, just waiting for their vector. And with the election of our 47th President, that vector has arrived.

Will our nation survive? It will, in some fashion. But I suspect it will require another generation like mine willing to march, and protest, and swim against a fetid tide in search of that more perfect union.

I hope I live long enough to see it.

---

CHUCK GREAVES is the author of Church of the Graveyard Saints and many other books. He lives near Cortez, Colorado.

GIVE TODAY