He is Not Worth This, America

America, he is not worth this.

This unrelenting chaos that we find ourselves emotionally drowning in: the manufactured emergencies, fabricated culture wars, and conjured crises that hound us from the moment we rise exhausted, until the second our besieged nervous systems finally allow us a brief, though uneasy respite.

He is not worth this prolific corruption, the boundless breach of ethics and legality that is enabling a tiny cadre of billionaires to gorge themselves on the lunch money of hungry schoolchildren, the salaries of public school teachers, and the insurance subsidies of sick seniors.

He is not worth this incomparable political malpractice; a kleptocratic Cabinet filled with the grossly unqualified, the morally compromised, the emotionally ill-equipped, and the unrepentantly cruel.

He is not worth this division; the billions of relational fractures he has, if not created, then purposefully exacerbated with a decade-long verbal torrent of incendiary war rhetoric, bottom-feeding dehumanization, and all-or-nothing tribal demands.

He is not worth this bloodshed; Good Samaritans assassinated in their neighborhoods, immigrant fathers dying alone in glorified dog kennels, young women expiring on hospital gurneys, cancer patients denied sustaining medication, Iranian schoolchildren buried beneath a senseless war of distraction.

He is not worth the end of our Republic, an imperfect but determined two-hundred-and-fifty-year experiment in Democracy having its life and liberty choked out by a sneering, narcissistic, intellectually fetal, morally bankrupt bottom feeder.

It could have been so easily avoided if, for a day two Novembers ago, we had simply come to our collective senses and chosen a steady, empathetic prosecutor and public servant instead of inexplicably embracing a felonious, predatory carnival barker with a lengthy resume of filth and fraudulence.

Had we done so, we’d have avoided having our military weaponized against our citizens, being illegally taxed for a year on nearly every expense, and battling an Attorney General who is harboring sexual predators. Hungry kids would have food support, our allies wouldn’t be abandoning us, and women would have body autonomy.

Most of all, had we spoken wisely at the polls in 2024, we wouldn’t have to spend nearly every waking hour defending ourselves from an authoritarian regime we alone coronated.

And yet, despite how far afield we’ve found ourselves from the nation our founders dreamed of and our forebears fought for, we could still course correct.

We could be delivered from this preventable, seemingly permanent hell scape this very day, if our representatives in both chambers of Congress weren’t afflicted with fearful spirits, stilled tongues, and feet of clay.

We could be immediately emancipated from the clutches of a heartless, joyless, dementia-brutalized sociopath if our elected leaders had the courage to abandon their unwavering tribalism, to stop worrying about saving their own political asses, and to do what the entire world knows they should do, and is waiting for them to do.

We could be released from this death spiral today if he were simply removed as our Constitution and the consciences of good people demand.

And if our leaders still refuse to bravely and righteously meet this moment, as they seem determined to do, what are We The People going to do?

How are we, as the shared heirs to this place, as beneficiaries of the activism, sacrifice, and bloodshed of billions, going to respond?

When our systems and safeguards and representatives have all failed, what are we willing to do together in order to pull ourselves from the abyss?

We will need to respond to these unprecedented existential threats in a way the people who have called this place home for a quarter of a millennium have never had to.

He is not worth being the hateful, bloated, spray-tanned hill this beautiful nation dies on.

How are we going to make sure that he isn’t?

(And, to his still ardent supporters: he is not worth your unwavering loyalty, your hatred of strangers, your disconnections from your loved ones, or your moving of the legal and moral goalposts. He is not for you or for this nation. I hope you’ll see this, one day soon.)