A Dividing Line Election
Speaking your truth and living with the consequences.
When America holds a presidential election, battle lines are drawn.
Friendships are strained, and families are sometimes frayed and torn apart.
People are saying as they do every presidential election year that it isn’t worth losing close relationships over something that happens every few years.
Most times, that’s true.
This presidential election is an exception.
America has never had a presidential election where one candidate has not only threatened to become a dictator but has a plan in place to become a dictator.
Most presidential elections end with one side winning, one side losing, and squaring up four years later to repeat the cycle.
That’s how things should work in a democratic republic.
Despite all of the policy differences over the years, the two main political parties have maintained the normal give-and-take that occurs in our type of government.
The Obama administration was when the GOP laid the groundwork for today’s zero-sum political atmosphere.
Even with the unpleasantness of the last fourteen years, this election is frighteningly abnormal.
There is one party that is pursuing the normal course of American presidential elections – explaining their policies, willing to debate their differences with the other party, and campaigning across the country to inform voters.
In contrast, the other party’s candidate has refused to engage in more than one debate. He holds rallies where he is openly spewing racist, misogynist, nativist language in a manner that has many questioning his mental state.
He has promised to be a “dictator on day one.” He has threatened to prosecute and jail journalists, politicians, and members of the military who have opposed him. He has unabashedly praised dictators and has said that he “wants generals like Hitler had.”
Project 2025 is a carefully constructed, in-depth blueprint to create a fascist state.
If enacted, it would negatively affect almost every American.
This is not an ordinary election.
Those who support the former president and his version of the Republican Party are enemies of a free and equal society.
This is not your regular “agree to disagree” election scenario.
As a Black man, someone who the former president clearly rates as inferior because of the color of his skin, I am in one of the groups who stands to suffer most if he is reelected.
He wants to protect law enforcement members involved in extrajudicial killings, killings where the perpetrators are overwhelmingly White, and the victims overwhelmingly People of Color.
His Project 2025 will continue to ban books and restrict the teaching of American slavery, Jim Crow, and the country’s long history of racial discrimination.
He will continue to restrict voting rights for non-Whites and the impoverished.
And I represent just one group that will be adversely affected by his return to the presidency.
Women and the LGBTQIA community will also suffer greatly.
Personal choice will continue to diminish until it is nonexistent.
Reproductive rights will be totally abolished.
We may not have elections in the near future to ensure that the former president and his cronies, who planned and executed the January 6th are safely out of danger of prosecution.
Please don’t tell me that I can agree to disagree with people who vote for him when there is so much at stake.
If it were only my political tastes and philosophical worldview at stake, I would still not want to lose, but I could live with it. I’ve done so before, and in future, more normal elections, I will do so again.
But in this election, the future of democracy in America is on the ballot.
The ability to have any semblance of freedom and liberty for me and millions of non-Whites, non-males, non-straight, non-gender conforming people are at grave risk.
Don’t tell me that I should just vote and take the results in stride.
Don’t ask me to live and let live with people who are actively voting for my oppression.
Don’t suggest that I give up what peace I have in American society to placate those who would do me harm.
I have friends and loved ones who are Republicans. There are a number of people who I dearly love and respect who disagree with me on political and philosophical issues.
But this election is not about Democrat versus Republican.
If it were, there wouldn’t be such an unprecedented number of Republicans who are crossing party lines to support Kamala Harris.
There wouldn’t be so many people who would normally support a Republican presidential candidate in open, vociferous opposition to the former president.
Many of us know what is at stake.
Sadly, there are far too many that don’t.
This issue is greater than me losing friendships and relationships, although that has happened.
It is greater than me feeling the need to unfriend, restrict, and even block former friends and loved ones on social media, although, sadly, I’ve had to do that as well.
It is a matter of maintaining peace and joy in my life.
I have friends who have asked me why I seem so angry and bitter when I used to be full of the joy of the Lord.
I still love Jesus. I’m still a Christian, a pastor, and on occasion, a Christian counselor.
None of that has changed.
What did change was that when I became fed up with how the disenfranchised in this country were treated, people that Jesus came to save, people He died for – People of Color, women, LGBTQIA people, I could no longer just pray for things to get better for these groups.
I had to become a change agent, an activist, something that I don’t always enjoy because I’m an introvert with all of the insularities and insecurities that go with being one.
Being an activist on top of being an introvert means that I must take extra steps to preserve peace and joy in my life above being prayerful and waiting on God to act.
It means that sometimes I must set boundaries and vigilantly maintain them.
I am far from alone.
This is what many of us are having to do in this season.
In America, we are living in the land of Odd.
Many of us find ourselves having to take unprecedented measures to keep our mental and psychological well-beings intact, while we ensure that this is a once-in-a-lifetime election.
Sometimes that looks like cutting off someone who used to break bread with me, laugh, joke, and pray with me, but someone who also attacked me publicly because of my writings instead of talking to me in private.
Sometimes it looks like minimizing, unfriending, and blocking people who I used to hug every Sunday morning.
I’m thankful for new and renewed relationships with people.
I’m thankful that all has not been loss but has also been gain.
I’m thankful for those who understand.
And for those who don’t, I pray for them.