She used to punch back.
She protected me on the playground. Fifty years later, she voted against my marriage. No one pushes me down anymore.
When I was ten, my cousin was my hero.
She was my best friend and my protector. She was a year older than me and I was a boy who only liked to play jumprope, house, and any other playground game that caused other boys to call me names or push me down. She punched back.
We used to dream about growing up to be ranchers. We’d ride horses and herd cows and live inside the stories of the old west we both loved. Somewhere in Colorado or Nevada. We had it all planned. Two kids who were going to build something together out in the open air, far from everyone. Freedom.
Then we grew up. We became different people. We let the dream fade. That was over fifty years ago.
I think about that ranch more than I should. It’s the memory that keeps her close to me, even now. Especially now.
Because here’s what I can’t hold in my head at the same time: that little girl who protected me, and the grown woman who voted for Donald Trump.
I was crushed in 2016. I couldn’t believe anyone in my family had pulled that lever. I told them this man would tear the country apart. He’d come after my marriage. He’d feed the hatred and the fear until it ran the whole show. They told me I was overreacting. They loved him because he “told it like it is.” A businessman who’d save us all and carry us into some golden age of jobs and money and safe streets. They couldn’t see it was a lie. A grift. A con.
They still can’t and we are no longer family.
So here we are. A civil war without muskets. The battlefield is screens and keyboards and Thanksgiving tables that don’t get set anymore. One side spits the gospel through gritted teeth and calls cruelty love. The other side has spent ten years asking why.
I started writing this the day I heard Megyn Kelly tell Haitians to go back to fucking Haiti. The Supreme Court had just cleared the way to deport 350,000 of them, people who’d lived and worked here legally for over a decade, and she celebrated. “Go home. Get out. We know our country is better than yours,” she said. “You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it. And half of you people, more than half of you, won’t assimilate. We don’t want you.” She threw in the old lie about Haitians eating pets, the one debunked years ago, because why let the truth slow down a good cruelty. A Princeton professor called it “profoundly racist. Morally reprehensible.” He’s right. It was also just sad.
Because here’s what I kept thinking. Megyn Kelly was a child once. She was kind to somebody, once. So was my cousin. So were all of them. Nobody is born telling families to get out. The hate is learned, fed, watered, rewarded. It grows.
I’m done asking why.
I was watching a video the other day. An anchor woman was talking about how secession talk is rising at the grassroots level all over the country. States feel held together now by a worn thin flag, ripped and tattered. Our common ground has dried up. Now here we are sorting ourselves into communities of sameness because it feels safer than the alternative. It hurts to watch the country go down this road. And I've stopped hoping we find our way back to a country that never existed.
For a long time I told myself she’d come back. That the girl on the ranch was still in there, waiting.
There’s a thing that happens when you hit a certain age. You start to notice your life isn’t the one you imagined it would be. Not out of sadness, exactly. Out of curiosity about past dreams. You turn it over in your hands and wonder where the other versions went.
That ranch was the other version. So was she.
Let me say the thing plainly. The President of the United States hates you. He hates me. He hates every one of us. He hates the left because we see him for what he is, a cheating, lying con man who has stolen billions and ruined lives so he could grift the right out of everything they own. And he hates the right too. He hates the poor people who worship him, because they disgust him. They're gullible. They're so full of hate he can bend them into submission with a sentence. And Donald J. Trump hates submissive people most of all. They're weak. He hates weak people.
So now what.
I’m figuring that out day by day. I don’t want to live with these people anymore, and they don’t want to live with me. This is probably where I’m supposed to tell you we can find a way back. That if we want to stay one country we have to find common ground.
I don’t want to find common ground anymore. My common ground is human rights and dignity full stop. If you can’t meet me there then we are done.
I won’t give up trans people’s right to exist without fear. I won’t give up a woman’s right to her own body. I won’t give up freedom of speech, freedom to live, and freedom to love whoever you love. I won’t.
I’ve never questioned anyone’s faith. Your spiritual journey is yours, not mine to judge. But I won’t be preached to. I won’t be shamed. I won’t live under your religious laws. I’m not interested in your conversion tactics. They are cruel, invasive, and most of all predatory. And I’m done softening my answers to make room for your need to convert me to feel comfortable. You’ve shown almost no regard for how I or my community exist in this world. I think it’s time we return the favor. You hurt people and call it love. It’s tragic how much you miss and how little you see.
You have the right to hate. I won’t even take that from you. That’s what freedom is.
I just won’t be polite about it anymore.
And somewhere out there is a woman who was once a girl dreaming about an imaginary ranch, who loved me before she ever learned to vote against me. I keep her in that story. It’s the only place left where we’re still on the same side.
I’m still that sensitive little boy. But no one pushes me down anymore. She taught me that, before she forgot it herself.
-David
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