Donald Trump is currently the President of the United States.

He lost the 2020 Presidential Elections two short months ago.

In the time since, and during the previous five years, Donald Trump has touted that he would only lose an election if it were rigged against him.

Due to a strange, archaic system that is not “one person, one vote,” members of Congress gathered today to officially certify the accepted winner of the election, Democrat Joe Biden, as the incoming 46th President of the United States.

During this certification process, supporters of the incumbent President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol — where one of their own would die — with firearms and other weapons including spears. They faced little pushback from those responsible for keeping the Congress secure. Lawmakers needed to be escorted out to ensure their safety.

Today, in 2020 America, there was an attempted coup d’état to install President Donald Trump for a second term, after having lost the popular vote in the last two elections by ten million votes. Republican lawmakers assisted in the incitement and attempt by sowing disinformation about election security.

Platitudes poured out on news channels and on Twitter of politicians and civilians saying: “This is not who we are,” or “We are better than this!" or “We must unify, not continue to be divided!”

But here’s the thing. Is this not who we are? Are we really better than this? Have we ever been unified?

Our country was founded on the backs of slaves that were stolen from their land. For the entirety of the history of the United States, there has always been a racial or socioeconomic (or both!) underclass of people. Their labor has been exploited, their civil rights violated, and their lives oppressed. We have always had xenophobic, authoritarian leaders. Even our Presidents that rank near the list such as Lincoln and FDR have dark histories. Quite frankly, I don’t give a shit about the standards of their times. If there were people that lived alongside them who pressured them to be more radical and ended up being on the right side of history, then they are to be judged against their most morally-clear peers. This is not to condemn the difference of opinions; it’s to denormalize the whitewashing of powerful historical people who wielded their power to suppress or oppress. You don’t have to respect politicians who harm millions of Americans and people worldwide. Hell, you don’t have to respect any politician. They are arbiters of power and they work for us as civil servants.

And yet, today was still a remarkable day. I genuinely believe that if the majority of Americans were to watch a movie that has depicted America in the last 4 years, most people would call the Donald Trump character the villain, and the Bernie Sanders character the protagonist. The reason here is that Donald Trump is motivated by power and resentment; Bernie Sanders is motivated by compassion for the majority of people.

Take the American political perspective off of it, and 80-90% of people would be in agreement about right and wrong. What we are currently experiencing is a country where there are two groups of people; the richest where money continues to ascend during a global pandemic, and the rest of us where wages continue to stagnate while inflation increases. This is why the stock market is not a representation of the health of an economy. In fact, our economy is anemic.

All of this is to say that I’ve changed my tune in the last 4 years. I’m done being frustrated with voters who feel disillusioned and betrayed by the system and the government. I will never tolerate any form of bigotry or hatred in my presence, but I’m done with thinking about how people vote, and I’m more focused on those who wield their power (McConnell, Cruz, Trump) to harm the rest of us (the disabled, LGBT+, Black and brown communities, women, Muslims, immigrants) for political gain. We must eradicate the likes of those ghouls from power, and we must rebuild a system that works for the majority instead of the few.

And while we may be at an inflection point where we’re having a political and social reckoning ala Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, America has been like this in one form or another since before its inception. We must not pretend there was ever a time where America worked for everybody it claims to work for; and we must not claim we are better than this until we actually demonstrate a functioning coherent government that is legitimately better than what we have seen over the last three centuries; and, by definition, then and only then, will we be more unified than we ever have been.

I’ve wondered for the last four years if my resentment of Donald Trump was “correct” or “self-righteous.” I’ve racked my brain and asked myself: What if I’m the exact same person that I think is wrong on every single issue? Maybe those people were right and I was wrong.

What led me to believe I was on the right path is what underlies the policies. As a person with cystic fibrosis, I have been harmed by policies that did not consider how they would impact me. At times, it feels that these policies were implemented with the express intent to harm people like me. Policies that are animated by resentment have never and will never be the correct policies. Compassion, not resentment, is the way.

We as a society can be better, but we never have been, at least not for the majority of our people.

“I love America more than any other country in this world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Said by James Baldwin: One of the greatest American writers of all time.

all the love in the world,

tré