The results of the 2016 Presidential Election have confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt something we already knew but secretly refused to acknowledge: there are two polar opposite Americas today that share little, if any, common ideological ground.
One of those Americas includes the youth, ethnic minorities, the LGBT community, immigrants and the college educated. This is an America that believes in equal opportunity and equal representation. This is an America that has transformed the constitutional goal of our forefathers from that of liberty and justice for all Christian, white men to that of liberty and justice for all. Period. Full Stop. Faced with an unstable job market and a changing social and global landscape, this is an America that values ingenuity and a multitude of perspectives. This is an America that seeks to create new jobs, new markets and looks forward to a more unified world full of new ideas. This is an America with a pioneering spirit and a heavy feeling of responsibility towards fulfilling that pioneering spirit. This is an America that believes we are responsible for taking care of each other because when one group of people becomes disenfranchised it means any group of people can become disenfranchised as well. No one is safe.
The other America includes uneducated, working class white men and women who have watched their old lifestyles vanish and are frightened of the future. This is an America that would rather see the wheels of progress come to a grinding halt than embrace the new challenges that a more global, more accepting, more inter-connected society has presented them. This is an America with severe insecurity issues. This is an America that can’t handle more than one sexual orientation, that believes foreign perspectives and peoples are dangerous and evil. This is an America that has known only one way of life and doesn’t know how to live differently. This is an America that imagines its vanishing way of life to be the product of a deliberate attack on them by a morally corrupt, insensitive government. This is an America that hasn’t learned how to cope and has misplaced their trust in an ignorant, arrogant megalomaniac who has never known struggle or hard-work but who promises to smite their enemies and deliver them from evil. In other words, a king — the very thing this country was established to denounce.
The division between these two Americas has never been clearer than now. Fed up with the establishment and perceived attacks on their way of life, the latter of these two Americas has set out to prove a point — that they do still have influence, a lot of it. Despite every effort of the past 8 years to eliminate prejudice in this country and address the underbelly of sexism and racism that exists in our society they have thrown their votes in to take the easy way out — to bow down before fear and insecurity and place their faith in a tyrant full of hot-air and hate. Ironically (and I say ironically because I know most Christians voted for this tyrant), I am reminded of that passage in Exodus when Moses returns from Mount Sinai with God’s Ten Commandments to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf. It took them only 40 days of unease during Moses’ departure to throw out everything their leader had done for them and resort to idol worship. 40 days. This country has benefited from 8 years of steady, intelligent leadership and still we have elected to worship an idol in its wake.
The next four years are going to be full of fear and anxiety for that first America, the America of minorities and the educated. This isn’t just about losing out over differences in economic policy, infrastructure and trade deals. This is about losing the most basic human rights of freedom and opportunity. But while the second America revels in their perceived victory the more intelligent among them may soon realize that they have not voted to make their own lives better but only to make their neighbors lives worse, wrongly believing the discrepancy between them to mean that they are better off.
After all, this is how kings remain in control — by pitting the peasants against each other.
This Side of Purgatory 