By Jan Scherrer
November 14, 2024 12:04 PM
Pardon our devastation. More than 75 million of our fellow citizens put a malevolent, criminal madman in the White House. We’ve watched you embrace him as he destroys your faith in science, education, and our government. You stuck with him after he lied and incited a deadly insurrection. You champion him as he demonizes and endangers nonwhite immigrants. You swallow his ridiculous lies about our public schools doing “sex change” surgeries. You ignore his plans to reverse the rights of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, even when you have loved ones that this will profoundly affect. You numbly nod as he repeatedly speaks of black jobs. Not a flicker of alarm when he stated immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” You support his promises to destroy families with immigrant camps and mass deportations. You cheer for him as he promises revenge on his political opponents. You excused him when he demeaned our dead war heroes. You ignore that he is a convicted felon, found liable for rape.
For eight years, the rest of America has made excuses for you. You’re brainwashed. Misinformed by Fox commentary. But that no longer tracks. You heard the words straight from his mouth. Even low information voters know he was convicted of 34 felony counts. That he was found liable for rape. His vile words and behavior don’t matter to you. You’re either in it for the promised tax break or the lawlessness or the hate. But you’re all in.
Decent Americans can no longer ignore or navigate our moral incompatibility with you. That is why so many people were devastated last week. We didn’t just lose an election. We lost friends and family and neighbors to a vision of America that is corrupt and dishonorable and cruel. We’re grappling with the reality that everything we ever learned about kindness, decency, honesty, respect, patriotism, fairness, and democracy has been relinquished by half of our citizens. We optimistically hoped that deep down, you were better than this. We learned you weren’t.
So what you now see aren’t liberal tears over a lost election. It’s brutal grief over our losses of friends and family who no longer share our understanding of right and wrong and what it means to be a decent citizen. And it’s fear for our daughters and our minority friends and neighbors who now have targets on their backs. We won’t expect you to feel shame. Our new clarity assures us you’ll laugh or shrug this off, turn on Fox News, and continue to gorge yourselves on immigrant crime, hate porn, and the evils of feeding school children a free lunch. You’ll consume more nonsense about how men supporting women turns them into women. Your hate and fear control you.
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Read more at: https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article295552374.html#storylink=cpy
Jan Scherrer is a speech language pathologist and mother of two who lives in Versailles.