Mourning for America's Lost Soul

While the election results are not final, it is looking as if Donald Trump, a man who in my view is a cruel and dangerous sociopath will be returned to the White House.  Many in America  - the LGBTQ community, people of color, Muslims, immigrants, the sick, the poor, the elderly - and the world at large with suffer this disastrous decision by American voters.  I take pride that my home state of Virginia rejected Trump, but I shake my head at the millions who voted for this horrible man.  I had perhaps deluded myself into believing that America was better than this, that deep down the vast majority of Americans are good people.   The vote tally so far tells me that the truth is something very different from what I wanted to believe. Clearly, America continues to cling to its racist and misogynistic past and maintaining perceived white privilege outweighs everything else for a majority of Americans. The irony is that if rump does what he has and Project 2025 promise, many Trump voters will suffer greatly financially and many elderly will never be able to retire as Social Security and Medicare face the chopping block so that billionaires can have more tax cuts.  America is now the Germany of 1933.  A post by John Pavlovitz sums up my sadness:

Kamala Harris didn't lose, America did.

As a nation, we collectively failed her—and in doing so we failed girls and women, the LGBTQ community, people of color, Muslims, Jewish people, immigrants, the sick, the poor, the elderly, the people of Ukraine, and Gaza, and the planet.

It's unthinkable, that instead of being able to celebrate a beautiful, hopeful new chapter in the story of this nation with a leader who appealed to the best of our natures—we will instead be holding a postmortem for democracy as we enter our 250th year, stewarded by a malevolent sociopath who despises empathy and shuns the law.

 I truly thought we were better than this, that our shared humanity would show up. I thought we would reject this hatred and ugliness once and for all. I hate being wrong about the majority of the people of this nation.

I don't know what's ahead. All I know is that good-hearted human beings are more necessary now than ever. We did all that we could to avoid this moment, but now that it's here we'll just have to decide who we will be.

There is no way to comprehend or measure how grievous an error this is, but the only thing the decent people of this nation can do is wake up tomorrow and fight like hell for what we still believe is worth the fight, and we will.

I'll be doing that with whoever has the strength to join me. I'm mourning the country we could have been and the one we apparently are—but I refuse to give up believing that compassion is the right path, that diversity makes us better, and that love is greater than fear.

Trump's likely reelection reveals that love is not greater than fear and hatred.  Pavlovitz had two other post that sums up my sentiments:

I will never forgive my family members and former friends for voting for him.

We now know that 2016 wasn't a fluke or an aberration, that this is what the majority wants: whiteness, patriarchy, nationalism, hatred, nihilism. . . . I just know that I'm seeing the nation with my eyes fully open and there is no mistaking what so many people I Ioved and once respected, actually value.