can't we all just burn it down?

On the other hand, when geographic lines are not as clear as they may have been at the start of the American Civil War, why the hell should we try to get along at all?

Regardless of the end results of last night's election, fifty milllion (plus) people just voted against Syrian refugees, against women, against people of colour, against the LGBTQ community, against government-funded healthcare, against the rich paying their fair share. They voted for conversion therapy, for trade war, for literal war, for misogyny and racism and so much white privilege that, honestly, I might support so many of my friends who are not white, not straight, not male, in leaving. Go where your pain might lessen. Or stay and fight with those of us white males who love you.

I wrote in favor of coming together late last night because that was the voice I needed in order to relax and to sleep. I put on my "practice reckless optimism" shirt this morning because that is the message I want to put out into the world. But, as I wrote last night, and upon waking this morning, I knew I would write something quite the opposite when I got the chance. I deliberately put away my anger last night because, fortunately, I'm good at compartmentalizing when I need to. Those who are already marginalized, though--including many of my favorite people--I understand that putting away your pain may be impossible. I am sorry.

For those of you who just won:

"Basket of deplorables" is the kind way of describing far too many of you. When some of you still call Barack Obama a Muslim, still call Michelle Obama a man in drag, call liberals evil, assume foreigners dangerous, assume poor to be poor by their own fault, assume that women should shut up and get back in the kitchen where they were when America was great, that black people should get into their inner city hells or find some other country in which to live, you damage the very ideal of what this country should have been. I made a point last night of separating greatness and goodness. America has been for a long time, and still is, great. It has been on track to becoming good and last night you derailed it. Your fear of someone coming for your guns, of someone coming for your religion, of someone coming for your right to speak your bigotry has, at least for now, ruined us.

Now, of course, that system is no longer "rigged", right? Because your people have control of the executive, of both houses of the legislative, and soon probably the judicial. Rigged does not mean that someone you don't like has won. Rigged means the poorest of us lack voice, lack power. Rigged means those marginalized because of their race, their sexuality, their place of birth are sidelined because history is written by the winners and straight white Christian men conquered this land and have laid claim to it as if their very lives depend on it.

So, the rest of us--the marginalized and the white men who do not want power taken through force of hateful rhetoric (or overt violence)--have two options:

1. The dangerous option, because rhetorically and literally it edges into violence, is to make their lives actually depend on it. Now, I do not mean that we bring it to violence. You need not take a life to make a life difficult. Republicans spent the past eight years hindering Democrat's political efforts, and far too often it worked more than it failed. And, when folks pronounce the race card expired this morning, we have driven ourselves backward. That is what they wanted. That is what they achieved. So, we do everything we can destroy them.

2. And, because that is edging too far toward violence (against the people who have all the guns, too), there is the more mindful approach. Keep speaking. Keep protesting. Keep demanding the right to personal choice, the right to immigrate, the right to be gay or transgender without being hated, the right to be black and walk down the street at night without being suspect, the right to have a vagina and a voice. Donald Trump is a populist. Show him what the populace really is. Show him the power of varied opinions, of varied backgrounds, of more than just one and definitely more than two genders, of numerous races and cultures and nationalities and show him that embracing a dangerous extreme only pushes the knife into the wound in the heart of this country further.

Wound or heal. Metaphorically. And do it so very loudly.

don't. shoot. him.

In response to the shooter Dylann Roof--a white supremacist who murdered nine black people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston--being taken alive, a friend of mine posted on Facebook, "Great... now shoot him." Comments that followed included the usual notions about coming up with something better because shooting it too good for him. Because that is what a wounded nation needs--more violence and more death.

If anyone deserves to die, it is the likes of this man. But, that is a very big if. You know what we lose if this man dies, if we torture him to somehow pretend that that cures any ill or repairs any damage done? I mean, aside from a piece of the soul of who we should probably try to be instead of being the fucked up, mostly indifferent people we are. We lose any hope of understanding.

Why would we want to understand this man, you might ask. Or some question close to it. Because the racism at the heart of this man's murderous rage is the same racism that is at the heart of too many scenes of men in authority--white men and, unfortunately, men of color--taking the lives of men of color because it is all too easy to assume the worst and shoot first rather than risk... well, knowing that you are an overreactive, triggerhappy pawn of a system that needs us to struggle constantly against one another rather than ever fight against the system itself or the powers and forces and people at the top that keep this treadmill going.

The recent incidents in McKinney, Texas come to mind. Some deep-seeded expectation that we have that when a police officer tells you to do something, you do it, no questions asked. It's not even a matter of race, so much as it some cult of authority in which we have ceded away far too much of our freedom for an illusion of security. Just this week, outside of Cincinnati, white officers were recorded using pepper spray and one put his arm around a girl's throat in the process of removing a black family from a swimming pool over a boy not wearing the "proper swimming trunks."

And, that seems like a tangent, an insignificant matter when I should be listing off the dead people of color who died because it is okay for the police to use deadly force and darker skin makes for more of a hair trigger. It's easier to suspect people of color of wrongdoing because we've spent centuries now just in this country putting white over every other color. Of course a black boy would seem a little more dangerous because he's an outsider and outsiders can't be understood, can't be reasoned with, must be put down. It would just be sad if we didn't constantly defend such a system and such a nation and such authorities. Instead it's far beyond sad, far beyond tragic; it's disgusting and its despicable and its criminal and we need to stop asking why and start demanding change. Not just people of color. All of us. Stop defending the system just because you happen to be on top of it. Stop assuming that any system works if it results in death after death after death.

And, do not demand more death as a response when you bother to take the right side for a change. We do not need to take the life of a guilty white man to prove some sort of fucked up equality. We need to stop taking the lives of men of color, stop taking the lives of, well, anyone, and take a long, hard look at the world we've made for ourselves, at the people it creates. Dylann Roof is an anomaly, but he is not so far gone from the police officer who throws a teenage girl to the ground because she didn't follow orders to vacate a neighborhood she should have every right to be in, he is not so far from the neighborhood watch coordinator who saw a boy in a hoodie and assumed he was up to no good.

We click like and we share news stories and think that's enough... it's not enough.

But neither is an eye for an eye. More blood just perpetuates the idea that taking a life is ever something worth doing. If your reasons are good enough for murder, it's a nice ol' slippery slope to his reasons being good enough, anyone's reasons being good enough.

Lethal force is not somehow magically good because it is ours. Because we're the good guys. We're not the good guys. Nor are we the bad guys. But we seem to have a knack for doing bad things. And we need to stop.