SPIRIT WOW: THE DEATH OF HOPE

What happens when a country abandons its better angels?

There’s a thing that happens sometimes in the Catholic Church. A person comes into confession, reports something terrible that has happened to them, and either confesses their fury, believing that it is a sin, or is counseled to forgive, as though that is something you can just wrinkle your nose at and make happen.

In fact, our responses to being harmed emotionally have the same moral status as the feelings we have after we’ve been harmed physically—that is, none at all. Your feelings are your feelings; they’re not good or bad. To say that feeling rage after you’ve been harmed emotionally is wrong is as nonsensical as condemning the pain felt after a wound. These are normal reactions, the body’s way of telling you something bad has happened to you. They are the way your self is trying to help you.  

There’s a lot of content online right now pushing people not to lose hope. Which is fine, I guess, if that’s where you’re at. But if you’re someone who is furious or grief-stricken or just out of hope right now, that is okay, too. How we feel in the face of what just happened is just how we feel. And no one gets to tell us otherwise.

Personally, hope is not where I’m at. I am at horror and disgust. While the mainstream media is giving me whiplash with its sudden spin that the Democrats are liberal elites who have too long dismissed “the people”—Am I not “the people,” I wonder? Are not the millions of immigrants that Trump plans to round up and deport? And what about wanting them and others treated with respect constitutes elitism?—in fact I spent the last few months giving rightward-leaning American voters the benefit of the doubt. They couldn’t be as taken with Trump’s violent, racist, unhinged rhetoric as some feared. They were, we are more decent than that. Ten days before the election the man threw a rally at Madison Square Garden inspired by a 1930s pro-Nazi rally at the same place. No way was America going to embrace that.

But tens of millions of Americans did, including 60% of those Catholics who voted. For years now it’s been clear that there is a growing schizophrenia within the U.S. Catholic Church, an ability amongst many to simultaneously consider themselves “good” while embracing practices and people that stand in stark contradiction with everything Jesus stood for. Catholics might insist that they voted for Donald Trump for good reasons, for other reasons, but no matter what reason they give, the fact is, they voted for a xenophobic racist who has praised Hitler, who fought to undermine the results of the last election, who regularly says things like “Someone should punch her in the face.” They voted to put that person, with that platform, back in the White House. And that is really frightening.

I don’t want to spend the next four years angry. But I’m also not going to spend them entertaining people who want me to believe that the real issue is the Democratic Party, or that I need to spend any more time “understanding” Trump voters. I played that game of Twister last time, thanks. If you voted for a racist anti-Semite who said he was going to do terrible things, that’s what you did. That’s who you gave your support to. And we will all suffer the consequences.

I don’t usually write about politics here, and I don’t plan to change that anytime soon. But those are my own set of Feelings-that-Come-with-Being-Hurt. And to some degree I actually hope they stick around. I suspect I’m going to need this fire, or its embers anyway, to survive the next four years. Also, when people treat others and this world with such disdain, fury and disgust are proper responses.

None of this may seem like material for a real hope. But if I’ve learned anything this week, it’s that a hope that doesn’t begin with a clear-eyed sense of what is actually true is not hope at all, but a childish fantasy. It might make me feel good, it might help me sleep or give me something clicky to post to say we’re all in this together, we’re all good people, blah blah blah. But I think this week proved that’s really not where we’re at. And wishing it were otherwise is ultimately not helping anyone.

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I’ll be back Monday.