(On this Memorial Day, I choose to honor the memory of a compassionate country, a champion of freedom, civility, patriotism and community, a light unto the world, a beacon for the tired and the poor.  We are lost at the moment; we no longer know who we are or what we stand for. We were never perfect, but we always struggled to be better. We will be better again. I believe there is a great awakening underway. Today, I imagine a world beyond Trump and Trumpism.  It won’t be easy or simple, but it is coming.)

 

President Trump was elected to disrupt our stale, corrupt, and disconnected capital city and culture. He did what he said he would do and more than he was asked to do.

His revolution was and is doomed to fail because he never expanded it beyond the people who surprised the world by supporting him.

But Trumpism is, in fact, a radical, even revolutionary movement. It is all about taking down one system and replacing it with another.

The irony is that Trump is sparking the next American Revolution, but he won’t succeed in finishing how own – he’s all over the place and alienated too many people. In that sense,  he has already failed.

He has shown us how broken we are as a country, and how much hard work and thinking we have to do about what comes next.

Memorial Day is the perfect day for me to mourn what we have lost these past few years and celebrate what is coming. It’s time for a different kind of revolution now.

I like to think ahead.

Our brokenness is truly ours, nobody else’s. How we are broken is as much an expression of our individuality as the way we walk or think.

The same can be true of our suffering.

Each human being suffers in a way no other human being suffers. Each human feels fear and grief differently.  Today, it seems we are all suffering, spiritually, as well as from the grip of a Pandemic

Trump is not a healing leader, he is, by choice and mandate, a divisive leader. When the two things come together – the divisive leader and a Pandemic – the results are truly awful – even deadly – to see.

We are up to our necks and souls in one of the most difficult and challenging times in modern American history.

How we choose to respond and react is personal for me,  not only a measure of my strength and perspective but of my humanity. And of the real power of ordinary people.

I am no fuzzy-headed pollyanna, but I believe Donald Trump will not be our president for four more years.

I could be wrong and have often been wrong, but I see a broken man coming apart and breaking into pieces. Nothing I see, read, or hear has altered that feeling. He seems to be more and more unmoored every day.

Trump can only handle adulation, criticism just rubs his skin right off. And that’s a real problem for him this year. There is such a thing as death by a thousand cuts, and also as death from a thousand battles.

It is time for me to start thinking beyond him because nothing will diminish his painfully unmoored psyche more than that. It is easy enough to hate him, but it is almost unbearable to watch him since the Pandemic came.

I am just about his age, and if I were saying and doing the things he is doing with the intensity and cruelty and rage into which he has now descended, I know I would not be able to function for very long.

I can almost feel the pieces peeling off of him, like a spaceship entering the earth’s atmosphere.

It is a frightening thing to feel; there is no pleasure in it.

Empathy is not just for people I like.

I do feel great empathy for this unhealthy man; I feel even more for the immigrants, the poor,  refugees, political opponents, journalists,  government workers,  working people, farmers, and ordinary citizens he has harmed and betrayed.

I think of a nation under siege day after day, year after year. The British taught us in World War II that this can make us tougher and smarter. I believe I see that happening every day.

I imagine a Post-Trump world at the end of this year, and I wonder what it will be like for me, and the other spiritually and emotionally drained survivors of this period.

And a note to those of you who love him: Mr. Trump will be fine, holed up in Mar-a-Largo, golfing his socks off, on the phone all night with his aging cronies, spouting off on his own new Reality TV show, and perhaps even his own network, from which to whine, lie, hate and rage.

Hmm…it sounds familiar. Nobody will need to miss him.

At this point, I’m prepared to consider that our President is an Avatar, something visual, not human, used to represent actual concepts or ideas, an image used to represent a person in the virtual world of screens, the Internet, and computers.

Be prepared for the possibility that he can’t die because he was never real.

But really, he will be fine,  and if and when he finally leaves the world, his last breath will be a lie. Keep the silver stakes handy.

Trumpism will not end with Trump.

The anger and divide will be there for a long time.  He has given us the great gift of seeing it and offering yet another opportunity to address it. Nobody wants to go through this again.

I imagine we will all be called upon to decide whether we can forgive the damage done to our country, or not, or whether just to pick up where hate and division left off, and present it in a different form.

There will be a lot of reckoning at the end of this year and for years to come. People who claim to be ethical and religious and compassionate people will have some decisions to make about forgiveness.

One way or the other, half the country will feel cheated and defeated in November.

Think of Abraham Lincoln’s generous plans for the South, discarded by his much crueler successor, something we are all still paying for.

Think of Nelson Mandela’s Reconciliation movement, which kept South Africa from tearing itself into pieces after apartheid.  Think of Gandhi’s pleas for Muslims and Hindus to live and work together.

Every healing leader is seen as a great leader. No dividing leader is. I don’t see any statues to Genghis Khan.

Think of Martin Luther King, who wrote that every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness.

It isn’t just the Donald Trump and his many supporters who have this choice to make; it’s the superior and often arrogant people on the other side who feel morally superior to every ideological and political movement that isn’t theirs. You know, those elitists.

And then there are the religious people, once thought to be uniters and healers, but now behaving like the Koch brothers.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “to be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

Perhaps after the cold and soulless – and pointedly ungodly – world of Trumpism, Christians will discover their roots and once again be a powerful force for good on the earth.

Henri Nouwen wrote that we humans could suffer immense deprivations with great steadfastness, but when we sense we no longer have anything to offer to anyone, we quickly lose our grip on life.

What do I have to offer in a post-Trump world?

The same thing I have to offer now: the choice to be better rather than to hate more. When Trump is gone, I want to offer a better way to be, if I can be strong enough and wise enough to do it.

I believe that is the story of the rise of Trumpism, that so many Americans felt they had nothing to offer to anyone, and so we lost our grip on our remarkable country.

I have learned that the joy of life comes from how we live together, and the pain of life comes from the ways we fail to live together.

To me, a Post-Trump world will call for a lot of reflection, a lot of listening, a lot of thinking about the many things that unite us as human beings – family, work, faith, highways, and bridges freedom, the creative spark, health care, and safety.

The people who want something better now will discover that hate and argument are not especially thoughtful or creative. They just don’t accomplish much. Everyone will need to decide what they have to offer.

You simply cannot argue half the country into having hope and feeling valued.

The core ideology of Trump’s presidency has been to exploit the divisions between us for personal political gain. The Pandemic has taken off his mask and laid bare this damaged soul.

I want to imagine a President after him whose core values were to bring us together. If one was so successful, why not the other? I pray it’s a woman making those decisions. They are the best at learning how to live together.

Is there a new leader strong enough to think outside of the hateful box we have been living in for some years now? I hope so, I believe so. Demagogues rise up when people feel lied to by their governments. But so do true leaders.

One President used his 50 million Twitter followers to promote anger and often lies and slander.

Another President could use his Twitter account to help people in need and ask the rest of us to help. That would in itself be uniting, a way for the whole nation to feel good about itself every day.

We will need to feel good about ourselves again. That will take a while. We will need a process for healing and reconciliation. We will need to listen and forgive. We will need to let go.

In a sense, listening and forgiving are revolutionary in America in 2020. So, perhaps we need a new kind of American Revolution.

On Memorial Day, I recognize the anger and divisions and hatred in our country and honor the things we have lost in the past few years. I miss the love of truth and the need to be decent to one another. I miss a country that loved its immigrants and cared for them, and that helped the weary and battered of the world when we could.

I sometimes have trouble recognizing the country I grew up in. But that country is not lost or gone, it is just reeling and preparing to give rebirth to itself.

The post-Trump world will be different from the Trump world, and I will work to remember that if I wish to be forgiven for the inexcusable things in me, I have to be willing to forgive the inexcusable things in other people.

So today, I take some time to pause and think about what we have lost as a community of people. I also take time to think of what we might gain. One comes after the other.

I am just a guy on a farm in upstate New York with some dogs and donkeys. But you heard it here. Another revolution is coming, I want to be a part of this one. Humpty-Dumpty is about to come off of the wall.

But we will have to put the pieces back together.

As I write this, I know full well that I am not likely to be alive to witness the final chapters in the story of Donald Trump and America. It only took a few years to nearly take America apart, it will take much longer to put the country back together.

But as long as I am here, I take full responsibility for the proposition that I will get the world I deserve. So will everyone else.