Long-Term Division: Not Just a Math Problem

United We Stand; Fractured, We Are…

I should’ve known better. And yet, longing for family is as strong as it is innate. We all want to belong, particularly to our original family.

Our tribe of origin…

Some of us are blessed with a family who loves and accepts us for who we are. We actually look forward to family gatherings, rely on them when life falls apart.

Or, when we fall down. We call upon, say, a big brother to reassure us that we are good human beings worthy of love and all the joy that life can bring. That we are safe.

Isn’t that what a big brother is for?

I know a few families where that romanticized idealism manifests at the Thanksgiving dinner table.

Mine is not one of them.

In these tumultuous times, division-and-fracture is as common an occurrence as it is effective for the fascist agenda. A community united is much harder to convince that the steaming freight train of corruption isn’t headed straight for democracy; that elections are a snowflake-liberal frivolity; that a state-sanctioned execution caught on dozens of smartphones didn’t really happen.

Or that a taxpayer-funded armed thug is untrained, simply because they felt it appropriate to murder Renee Good or Alex Pretti. Such officers were indeed trained to be as intimidating and violent to show us just how dissenters and protestors will be treated and in which ways they will be silenced.

No decent human being would ever need training to understand that taking the life of innocent citizens asserting their First Amendment Rights is not justified grounds for a death sentence.

A united community can’t be tricked into believing the lie that only you believe in the idea that all life deserves to live as well as you or at least be afforded the chance.

A fractured humanity is easier to conquer. Leave ‘em fightin’ for the scraps on the ground while they loot the treasury.

I suffer from such fractiousness in my own family of origin. Every so often, I test out the waters to see if the cruelty, disrespect, abuse and resentment from my two maga-supporting brothers still holds true. I hold in my ever-hopeful heart that I will one day be disabused of the notion that they hold me in as much resentment as our VP holds a couch in his adoring fantasies. The things my brothers have expressed about their college-educated sister. That they came away from adolescence with a GED and called it good, escapes their limited awareness.

They’d rather attribute any of the goods I enjoy in my own life as byproducts of the men therein.

No matter the work I put into my life, the sacrifices and discomfort. Seventy-hour work weeks in my early twenties driving horse-drawn carriages in downtown Chicago for eight years in subzero temperatures in Christmas season. Working overtime at the law firm. Working full-time in our mom-and-pop law practice while I attended a university part-time, slogging through seven long years taking pursuing a bachelor’s degree.

Living in a barn above our animals without running water, on solar for ten years. Or a miner’s cabin in an old townsite for two.

None of that counts as a valid, dedicated effort at self-improvement or success to make more of my working-class origin in the mind of a misogynist.

So, when I shared of the recent condemnation issued by three Catholic Cardinals of the human rights violations against the clown car that is this current Administration, I decided to poke the Christian right-wing bear that is one brother of mine:

For supporting Trump’s racist agenda, you could go to Hell, I wrote.

My brother has been only too happy to let his Buddhist-believing sister know the many ways in which my everlasting soul will find itself in extreme temperatures rather than basking in the cooling, gentle air higher above. For not living as he does, he is quick to inform, I should prepare myself and bow down in repentance before it’s too late.

That, and stop writing about the Orange Cheeto. Or speaking up for the rights of the vulnerable and matters of social justice.

In my own defense, reaching out in such ways was a long time coming. Last I heard from my brother, I was supposedly as ignorant of the Israel-Gaza conflict as I was a lesser human being for loving animals too much.

That, and I needed to get out of the mountains where all that nature was twisting my mind.

When I read the recent condemnation from the three Catholic Cardinals, I channeled my long-departed Catholic father and waved it in both my brothers’ electronic faces. Too many racial epithets and All in the Family narratives had been let go.

God said Adam and Eve, NOT Adam and Steve, my brother often said, followed by You broads who should know your place.

My hopeful heart felt vindicated by a papal edict. Wrong is wrong, enough is enough.

Alas, the axiom that the vestiges of time are as unyielding on a hardened heart and closed mind hold as much truth as this administration spews lies and false narratives. The on-screen murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good must be impacting every American, or changing the hearts of the most dogmatic cult members, mustn’t they?

What kind of a person supports a government killing its own citizens?

Anyone who hates Trump hates America, my brother responded.

Images of eight taxpayer-funded thugs converging on top of Alex Pretti before firing several rounds into his pinned-down body flashed in my mind. Renee Good, backing away, saying I’m not mad at you, dude. Thousands of Midwesterners freezing in Minneapolis’s streets to protest against state-sanctioned executions of people exercising their First Amendment Right. Or their Second Amendment Right.

Or, just their right to live.

I know from my Chicago carriage driving years about bone-chilling January days. Despite fascist and Fox news narratives to the contrary, the only payment for Minnesota protestors was the sense of asserting their belief in free speech, and a sense of reaching out their hand to take hold of democracy on the precipice of falling off a cliff.

Anger sidled alongside disappointment. Not even two murders by federal agents of innocent citizens on America’s streets had moved his moral barometer.

Our father would be ashamed to know who you’ve become, I wrote of my French immigrant father who fled the Nazi invasion of France at the age of nineteen.

God’s not interested in your opinion, he responded.

I wanted to say, I’m not asking God, I’m asking you, but I took a deep sigh, instead.

Once a cult member, always a cult member.

As with millions now divided, the entry point of any discussion on morality and humanity could begin where it left off.

Or align with our present new reality.

But with my maga-loving extremist brother, the dialogue over the fate of my Buddhist-embracing soul was as much of a topic for discussion as his belief that I was condemned to brimstone and hellfire.

All paths lead to the Divine, I once offered in hopes of landing on common ground.

Such versions of stay in your lane only provoked his ire:

Your God is a dead little god.

Hmmm…Buddhism is five centuries older than Christianity, not to mention it allows for all other faiths. Like, Christianity.

And yet, having grown up with a charismatic Christian mother who wrote $20 checks to Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Tammy and Jim Baker out of her own so-so-so-bitty monthly checks, dogmatism closes the minds as quickly as it shuts down the heart. There was no shattering my brother’s rose-colored view that his version of Christianity embraces hatred of all those brown people.

His unwavering, perennial support of a man twisting the soul of this nation into a pretzel, of a man choking the last breath of life out of democracy, was as solid as it was back in 2016.

For my still-maga-loving brother, what’s happening to our nation is as right as rain, all good with me, sis.

I thought of the thousands on the streets of Minneapolis and across the nation demonstrating what the heart of humanity has to say about such hatred of their fellow man. And I cried tears of relief that there are millions, if not billions, who would disagree.

In honor of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, taken unjustly and far too soon. May your deaths have not been in vain, for justice will prevail.