When I think of another Trump presidency, I shiver to my bones from just knowing that he will, based on his granted immunity if he commits a crime, devise, out of his love of dictators, some yet to be seen extremely obscene form of autocracy that will relatively-speaking bring our society to its knees. And, oh, there would be so much that I would miss if it came to this: the loss of human decency, a time when politicians didn’t necessarily see their opponents as natural enemies and would occasionally speak to how they wanted to reasonably make the country better rather than badmouth it, a time when there wasn’t quite so much bullshitting and lying and when women had control of their bodies, a time when no leader would dare say that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs, or invite someone to speak at a rally who would make jokes about watermelon loving Black folks and claim that Puerto Rico is “a floating island of garbage” when it is a land of intense beauty as far as the eye can see, home to many amazingly outstanding people. I will particularly long for the days when we were in step with our allies who have been determined, as we have been, to keep democracy in the world alive, days when we were not the least bit willing to toy with the dark ideas of a man who is focused on himself alone with “concepts of a plan” to destroy the beauty that lies at the center of our way of life, the notion that each of us, through our participation, can create a nation that can meet the social and political needs of everyone. I would miss how, I, over my lifetime, never once considered, as I have lately, that pursuits for liberty and justice could someday be dead and done. And, of course, now since election day is yet to be I wish, with all that is within me, that when the ballots are counted that this menace to humanity has lost and Kamala has won by the ton You can call me one well-wishing son-of-a-gun.
Ernie McCray is an activist for love and peace who acts and sings and writes both poetry and prose, a man who rises each day to do whatever he can, no matter how small or grand, to make the world better in some way.
Unapologetically.