( Donald Trump’s Daily Gift To His Enemies: This morning, he retweeted a conspiracy theory suggesting that 75-year-old old Margin Gugino, who was pushed to the ground and left bleeding by two Buffalo, N.Y., police officers, was really a trained “intifada provocateur” whose injuries were exaggerated or faked.  Don’t get mad. Get kind.)

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.“- Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass also wrote that without a struggle, there could be no progress. He said that the white man’s happiness could not be purchased by the black man’s misery.

Those are two quotes for the ages, but especially for now. The struggle is underway.

I’m struck by how many people message me to say how afraid they are. That’s disheartening. A part of me wants to say suck it up, a part of me wants to take them in my arms and hug them.

I think this year will take some strength and focus.

The 2020 election is shaping up as the election of a lifetime, a great – and perhaps urgent – opportunity for America to discover if it can find it’s soul and heart again and turn away from these dark days of cruelty, division, greed, corruption, and dishonesty.

Can we make America kind again? Can we believe our leader again? Can we learn to speak to each other again? Can we deal with the many awful ghosts of racism?

All those feeding at the trough that our capital has become right now will fight very hard to keep that from happening. No place for summer soldiers.

A radical new twist: Black Americans are now at the forefront, not the back, of the national struggle for compassion and equality. African- American voters have long complained they have been taken for granted and forgotten.

They are not forgotten now.

Black women are out front, taking the lead and poking the big and angry bear.

That is very different. There is something very exciting about it.

In this election, black lives will matter as much or more as they ever have, and the election will matter as much as any election ever has.

President Trump knows it, and he is lying with a vengeance and tweeting up a storm to block their way and change the narrative that is threatening to engulf his presidency.

He can’t stop talking trash. In division he trusts.

Frederick Douglass wrote that the struggle for freedom might be a physical one or a moral one, or it may be both.

But, he said, it must be a struggle. Power, he said, concedes nothing without a demand.

Following the killing of George Floyd, the struggle has become a moral one.  There is really only one issue in the election right now. Can we become a moral nation again, if we ever were?

What is on the table is nothing less than right and wrong.

America will have to decide, perhaps for good,  what it wants to be: the light of the Golden Lamp, or the Corporate Nation, the country with a stock ticker for a heart.

I see Donald Trump differently than many of the people who are reading this and pleading with me to write about him in an angrier and more hateful way.

I don’t need to do that. All I need to do is make sure other people know what he is saying. All I need to do is be better.

This election, I intend to follow  Frederick Douglass’s inspiration and words. My voice, my pen, my vote. Those are my marching orders, and I can do all of those things by myself.

I have no wish to lecture people or tell them what to do. We can’t change the world, we can change ourselves and our world, one person at a time.

What I will do is work hard for a kinder and more equal and compassionate America. I want my country back. My voice, my pen, my vote.

I’ll take my pledge and swear an oath on it. That’s where I will be in November.

Mark Twain said that a lie could travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.

Donald Trump lies more often than any well-known politician in American history and is loved and admired for it.

We are all dizzy from trying to keep up.

And it has gotten old and tiring and disturbing.

But we are keeping up.

President Trump is a stranger in his own land, a wanderer now.

But from the first, he has been a gift to me and many others, even if it’s hard for many people to see it that way.

He is the most compelling argument I have known in my life for a kinder, more compassionate, and moral America.

He has challenged me to be a better man than he is, and while the jury is still out on that, I know I am better than I was.

Donald Trump has taught me the importance of being a patriot, and of fighting for my country. He has taught me the moral power of the refugees and reminded me why they are a mirror of the moral health or sickness of our country, the heart of the American Experience.

When they ask me what is happening, I tell them this not the real America, the real America is the one buying Price Chopper Gift Cards so they can eat.

President Trump is the only reason I am writing this today, and the only reason you are reading it.

Whatever good comes out of this flows in a considerable measure from him.

He is what I call an Inverse Moral leader. People embrace the opposite of almost everything thing he does or wants to do.

That is not how democracy is supposed to work, but it will probably save all of our necks in autumn.

He is the reason for many of the good things in my life. He is inspiring us and guiding us every day.

And that, in the final analysis, is why he will lose. He is on the wrong side of history, of the people he is sworn to govern, and the wrong side of truth and righteousness.

He’s also on the wrong side of potential voters.

He voluntarily chooses to be on the wrong side of good and evil, and so he is responsible for what he has done, just as I am responsible for what I  have done.

He may refuse to take responsibility, but he will ultimately be held responsible.

“The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit,” wrote Douglass,” and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell is presenting the semblance of paradise.”

I couldn’t help but thinking of that grim man holding a Bible up with his right arm. Having nothing to say was what he was trying t

Paradise may be beyond the reach of a country so vast and diverse and idiosyncratic as ours.

But I feel in my bones that we will do better than this:

“In thinking of America,” wrote Douglass, “I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery, and wrong, — when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.”

If you can’t read these words and feel something in your heart,  then this is not your time. If you can, the angels will come in their robes this year, and offer us a semblance of paradise.

I was always an observer, content to stand back and watch, away from the fire. I am still an observer, a watcher. But I feel the fire.

It is not light that we need, wrote Douglass, but fire: it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

Last week, the storm finally came, we are learning that many things are as important as a booming economy. We are learning that elections matter and bring real change, we are learning that government matters, it is sometimes the glue that holds our worlds together.

And yes, we are learning that black lives do matter.

Sitting up on my farm, looking back on the history I have lived and seen, I can tell you with a full and open heart that I hear the thunder, the ground trembles with the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

Hang in there Frederick, your prophecies are stirring and looking for the light.

I can’t predict the future, that is voodoo, not thought.

But I know that today, right now, the fire has come.