To Donald Trump, with Love

I think I have to love Donald Trump, y’all – for realz!

I’ve been thinking about radical love and radical forgiveness. Someone once told me that to hate someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die from it. There’s a school of shamanism that says all of life is just a collective dream. Consider that everything we know of, on the sub-atomic level, is made up of the same stuff – protons, neutrons and electrons. They’re not even connected, they spin around each other setting off reactions in an endless cycle of degeneration and regeneration. It’s all a bunch of fragments that have come together out of some agreement. Who’s to say that agreement doesn’t spring from the collective we? The world may indeed have been flat as long as everyone agreed it was. It’s possible that agreement about the shape of the world, changed the shape of the world. It is impossible to know.

It was also “impossible” that Donald Trump could become president, and yet here we are. It is possible that the horror struck by the thought of a Donald Trump presidency was enough to make it manifest. It is possible that we allowed our focus to shift from electing a candidate we wanted, to being terrified enough of the alternative that we feared it into being. So, now here we are. Like people caught in a nightmare of our own making. I have experienced a loathing beyond what I thought myself capable of. That loathing has turned into a festering boil and I must see it raging and full to bursting on the cheek of the political landscape. It shrieks, it tweets, it campaigns endlessly. It pursues me in every waking moment in one fake news flash after another. Just when I think it couldn’t get worse, enter a pandemic.

There’s only one thing left to do: surrender. I have to give up wishing there wasn’t a Coronavirus. I have to give up wishing we didn’t have buffoons storming the capital in Lansing with assault rifles. I have to give up hoping that I will wake up to find Ahmaud Arbery was not shot after being chased by a white former law enforcement officer and his son. I have to stop thinking that Donald Trump is going to get bored and turn the presidency over to someone who isn’t a worse version of himself. I have to surrender and accept, like in the Serenity Prayer, the things I cannot change. Only through accepting it, is their hope of transforming it.

If we're all the same stuff, and I believe we are the same, then I am Donald Trump. I am former police officer Gregory McMichael, and I am his son Travis. We are part of the same material universe. I have expected the worst from people like these and they honor me by being what I expect. More than that, there is something in myself that they reflect back at me – a part of myself that I loathe. There’s a saying in recovery: You spot it, you got it! What is it in these people that I carry in myself, so that deep down I feel like this is the president – this is the world of my own making? Perhaps this is the world I’m convinced I deserve. What aspect of “me” am I rejecting when I spit curses at these parts of the universal whole that I have rejected as others? What soul sickness am I manifesting outwardly and what effect is it having internally?

Okay, maybe I don’t need to want to invite these people over for dinner, but if they do mirror back a part of myself that I am rejecting outright, am I not obligated to investigate that? Am I not obligated to love myself unconditionally? Maybe learning to separate beings from their actions and love others unconditionally is the preparation for self-acceptance. I won’t take the inventory of Donald Trump, Greg McMichael or Travis, but I can recognize a wounded, aging, self-centered tyrant in myself. I can explore my own internalized racism that gets uncomfortable when a group of hooded, loud talking Black youth enter a space. I can even consider the ways I waste natural resources carelessly because I have the privilege and the luxury of doing so. I certainly benefit from the actions of exploitation and violence perpetrated around the globe to keep me in luxuries I barely appreciate.

Maybe the best thing I can do for myself is love Donald Trump. I might even learn to embrace COVID-19 as an extension of the person I have become. Perhaps that will inspire me to change and believe in the possibility of these others to change too. Maybe in demonizing myself and others I have cultivated the monster in everyone around me and magnified it until it was true. That, however, also means I could do the opposite. I could love unconditionally and hope the best for everyone, even Donald Trump, and manifest a change in myself and others.

I don’t know. I might be spinning straw into gold. Your turn. Talk.