“I sure hope you’re right…for my kids’ and grandkids’ sakes. God speed -” Kathie

Me: “It’s not about being right or wrong, Kathie, I’m not God. It’s about being honest. No one can know what the future will bring, only that it is unlikely to bring what we think it will bring. Peace and strength comes from inside of us, not outside…”

I will never give my power and well-being over to Donald Trump, or his followers, or Marjory Taylor Greene, or the brain-damaged zombies who stormed the capitol, or the many people who need lies to get them through life.

I am sorry to see that so many people do.

I wrote about the return of Donald Trump the other day, and I was trying to say the genius of the American system is that, in many respects, we are an ungovernable people.

Today’s rebellious government haters could easily be tomorrow’s great evil, the target of tomorrow’s rebels. Our system makes it almost impossible for any single group to dominate for too long or too well.

As Trumpism has proven, it is easy to get people to hate and fear their government.

Paranoids and King-haters conceived the American experiment; there are so many checks and balances and obstacles and rules in the system that it is challenging for anyone to get anything done.

Breakthroughs like Social Security and The Affordable Care Act are bloody and hard-fought and rare.

Our system is built around the idea that we don’t like being told what to do and that people with power must be monitored, mistreated, doubted, and checked. It is a frustrating, even frightening system.

But it would be a big mistake to conclude that Donald Trump is capable of or likely to take over this system and turn it into a national tyranny.

Imagine for a minute being a leader trying to conquer tens of millions of people in Black Lives Matter, Me Too, the Poor People’s Campaign, all of urban America and much of academe, suburban women (women in general), moderate and independent voters, liberals, progressives, the media, and publishing what to do.

There is not a major city in America where Donald Trump is not despised and no rural county where he doesn’t love. We will either learn to work it out with one another or perish because neither side is ever going to win.

As President, Trump couldn’t even speak a word of truth about a pandemic, how is he going to manage the lives of tens of millions of people.

Trumpism was and is a big wave, and Trump got hit with an even bigger one in November. Why would we assume there can only be one?

Just as the country’s current rulers can’t force everyone to wear masks or accept vaccines, the previous rulers couldn’t force us to surrender undocumented immigrants to the police or accept the lies and fantasies of an insecure sociopath.

President Biden is about to launch some form of stimulus package over the fervent objections of half of Congress. It may well be the only thing of such real substance he can do in his time in office. In two years, the equation will change, one way or another.

And then, in two more years, it will all change again. The notion of a calm and stable place for years and years in a democracy is a fable, a fantasy.

And believe me, we in the “resistance” are just as difficult – even impossible – to govern as they are, and can be just as defiant, aggrieved, willful, and rebellious. We like to think the opposition is completely different from us, and in many ways, that is true.

But in many ways, we are more alike than we care to imagine.

As I told Kathie, I am not a psychic or a seer,  neither am I a genuine pundit; no one should assume that everything I say is true or will come true. I can’t promise Kathie or anyone else that I am right.

Anyone who claims to see the future in politics is a fraud.

It is never my goal or certainty to be right, only to be honest and authentic. I’ve spent decades dealing with my own kind of mental illness, 30 years in different forms of therapy.

I’ve grown a lot and learned a lot, and one of the most important things that I have learned is that peace and strength can really come only from me..

Thomas Merton’s famous essay “Down Is the Way to Well-Being” captures how I have chosen to live. We are taught that sadness and fear are soul-sucking and unacceptable.

Higher is always better than lower; we are told. Fear and anger are the works of Satan, diseases to be expunged.

When we fall, as we often do, as a people, as a country, we have a long way to fall, and we are terrified that the fall will cripple or kill us and end our very existence.

But a life with struggle, a life “down on the ground,” as Parker Palmer put it, allows us to stumble and fall, get back up, brush ourselves off and take the next steps, often with less harm than we feared or were promised.

We learn and grow stronger.

President Trump and his increasingly hateful ideology challenge us to develop compassion,  ego and personal strength, inner peace, and a viable and acceptable sense of self.

I believe he has spawned an unintended spiritual yearning to connect with our own moral values, our sense of truth, the human need for mercy and empathy.

I have never in my lifetime seen so many people paying so much attention to one another.

The spiritual journey, says Palmer, is an endless process of engaging life as it is, stripping away our fears, delusions, jealousies, and resentments, moving closer to reality as we do.

Death, after all, is the end of all illusions. Why not, I ask myself, shed my illusions and embrace reality before death takes the power to choose away from me?

There is nothing like a moral or political crisis to ground me in the great meaning and power of mortality and meaning. We and our tiny lives are just not as important as we think we are.

To put any politician in charge of my emotional well-being is a surrender  I just can’t bend my knee to.

I fear for all those angry and aggrieved people following Donald Trump as they come to see what they have given away and lost.

And believe me, they will come to see that.

Mr. Trump will make it so, as he has always done.  He leaves a long and bloody trail of an army of damaged and disillusioned people behind him.

I strongly believe that what I wrote to Kathie is true.

Peace and strength come from inside of us, not outside.

No politician or President, or demagogue can give this to us or take it away.