Tweets and Facebook posts, opinion pieces, essays, poems, signs, memes, heated discussions over our over-priced coffees, phone calls and tv spots have, for weeks, been roaring with one message:
Trump cannot become our next president.
This call seems to reverberate all around us. And because we see it, hear it and feel the vibrations from the voices that chant it, pray it, hope it, we think it must be so, and that Trump won't win.
He can't win.
However this morning I woke up to find the internet once again swollen with tales of celebrated hate and intolerance from the Republican National Convention.
And I realized, with the cold, horrible stillness of certainty--
Trump has already won.
Even if he loses the election, he has won.
He has successfully achieved something that slavery, wars, race riots, internment camps, fights for equality on all levels, corruption, depressions, recessions, gun violence, health care disasters, a slowly imploding educational system, racism, sexism, ageism, and prejudice and bigotry of all kinds have not, separately quite managed to do:
He has brought the United States of America to the edge of collapse. And right now, at this moment, as the Republican National Convention spirals slowly out of control, we are watching our country's death throes. It is ugly. It is vicious. It is terrifying.
Trump has become the glue for the worst of our country, bonding together a juggernaut of intolerance, ignorance and fear.
You may disagree with me. That is fine. Disagreement is healthy. Debate is vital.
But I ask you this: no matter who becomes our next president, how can we heal from this? How can we move on and put our country back together?
Trump is the magnifying glass in the sun to our dry, brittle, underlying ugliness, and the fire is burning before our eyes.
It is no coincidence that there are now innocent people being killed--mostly by guns--every day.
Every day.
And I'm not going to break it down into little packets of divisiveness--how many police officers were killed, how many black people were killed. How many liberals, how many conservatives. It is enough that innocent people were killed needlessly. Shouldn't this be enough to bring us together in our rage?
Evidently not.
Trump is the champion of a shockingly wide swath of primarily white Americans who have been the victims of a fractured, incomplete educational system, a troubled economy and skewed guidance by their leaders in politics, church and school.
And as the champion, Trump has legitimized, endorsed and encouraged what has become an orgy of intolerance, hate, violence and division.
In a stunning bit of final irony, it was not--as Trump supporters would've predicted-- the immigrants, the liberals or the LGBTQ folks who are bringing the United States to its knees.
It is a swollen morass of fearful, frustrated and tunnel-visioned white folks.
Those of us watching the disaster unfold from the sidelines may comfort ourselves by believing Trump to be a singularly stupid man.
He is not stupid.
He knew precisely how to exploit the "art" of this "deal".
And now we will all pay his price.
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