“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are still truly good at heart.” ~ Anne Frank

Let me start by saying that I do not feel up to this. My thoughts aren’t provocative enough, my mind isn’t sharp enough. The mental muscles required to draft cohesive sentences and paragraphs have withered from months of disuse inside my skull. I haven’t written anything longer than a tweet in eight months. My brain feels as flabby as my ever-increasing waistline. I do not feel up to this.

But Donald Trump is coming. And so, like a severely depressed person who has to physically drag themselves out of bed to stand under the icy hot blades of a painful shower, I have to force myself to compress my thoughts into an essay. To capture a moment. To say “I was here.” To resist, in some small, irrelevant way, the unstoppable force that is sweeping through our nation.

It is not a good time to be a liberal. Not in America, not in the world. Authoritarian fascism is on the rise throughout all of western Europe and the United States. White supremacists feel emboldened and supposedly good-hearted Trump voters can’t see it. What is a liberal supposed to do?

I was in a mosh pit once. I hated it. I didn’t know it was a mosh pit until the music started and crowd started undulating. It was a terrifying experience: being squeezed on all sides by forces beyond my control, being pushed and pulled in ways that I had absolutely no control over. I was at the mercy of the crowd. I was helpless. I only managed to escape because I was relatively close to its edge. Donald Trump has turned America into a mosh pit, and this time there is no escape, as I live nowhere near Vermont.

The human condition has always been a dichotomy. Good vs. Evil. Yin vs. Yang. Man vs. Woman. Life vs. Death. War vs. Peace. Heaven vs. Hell. Everything that we do, everything that we conceive, has an opposite on the spectrum. The Haves vs. The Have Nots. So, it shouldn’t shock me that the country that voted for Barack Obama would turn around and vote for Donald Trump.

It shouldn’t, yet it does. It shocks and depresses me. And it makes me fear that all the good–ALL the good–that humans have accomplished over the past century will be undone. It can all go away. All the Jews in Europe were eradicated in one twelve year period…eradicating liberal governmental policies would be much easier to do, I would think, if the Republican government is determined to abolish them.

Liberal vs. Conservative. Love vs. Hate.

I am not naive. I don’t think that being liberal means that everyone magically gets along and everything is perfect. Being liberal doesn’t mean that I’m not concerned about threats. Being liberal doesn’t mean that you don’t have negative emotions and fears–it means that you diligently fight against them. To me, it means that you don’t let them control you.

Dark vs. Light. Hope vs. Despair.

Conservatives are not the least bit concerned about being controlled by fear. They actively stoke it. They see it as a sign of weakness if you’re NOT alarmed by obscure threats. When threats are everywhere, everyone is an enemy. And they seem perfectly comfortable viewing life that way. Us vs. Them. They are actively trying to protect themselves and their nation. To them, liberals are simply letting the threats in.

They don’t see. They. Don’t. See. All they know is that they’re afraid. They don’t know how to calm themselves down. They don’t know how to suppress fear through deep breathing or any other exercise.

Afraid of immigrants? Don’t bother trying to see immigrants as simply honest, decent human beings who simply want a chance at a better life. Don’t bother seeing their inclusion into our society as a net positive, one that brings fresh hope and fresh ideas to our nation. No. Build a bigger wall. Ban them. Keep them out.

Afraid of terrorism? Don’t bother trying to put it into perspective. Don’t bother realizing that more people are killed by lightning than are killed by terrorism in this country each year. Don’t you DARE diminish its control over your mind. Be afraid. Do everything you can to prevent an abstract concept from existing, even at the expense of your own civil liberties.

Conservatives are afraid of everything that I see as a positive good. Abortion. Public schools. Vaccinations. Climate science. Gun control laws. Environmental protections. Minimum wages. Medicare. Unions. Labor laws. Usury laws. Civil rights. Civil rights? Yes, they are even afraid of civil rights. They see granting a transgender person the dignity and freedom to urinate in the bathroom that correlates to the gender they identify with as a threat. They see affirmative action and voting rights laws as threats. A growing number of conservatives think it even makes sense to allow businesses to discriminate. Conservatives now call discrimination “freedom.”

Conservatives are so consumed by fear that they’re afraid of people who want to burn the flag or sit during the national anthem. I mean, who gets mad about that? Weren’t we the country who used to laugh at the oppressive regimes in places like North Korea who forced their citizens to worship their “Dear Leader”? And now we’re demanding blind obedience from our citizens and calling it “liberty”?

Everything that I believe in is under violent attack in this country by conservatives. And conservatives have A LOT of power in this nation. They run it. Liberals in Vermont and New York might feel like they are in liberal havens, but make no mistake, this is a conservative nation.

People have no problem accepting murder/suicide by readily available handguns as “the price of freedom in this great nation of ours,” but howl about the “Holocaust of the unborn” when a woman who, through her own wisdom and life experience, wants the freedom to have an abortion if she feels it is in her family’s best interest.

Of course I see the irony of being terrified of a Trump presidency while chastising conservatives for being controlled by fear. I see the potential damage that will be caused by the policies that Trump wants to enact, and it is hard not to be afraid for the health and safety of millions of Americans. Hell, since his bellicose rhetoric is the strongest we’ve heard from any candidate in the nuclear era, it’s hard not to fear the very real possibility that he could launch a nuclear war, killing billions of us in the process. He has already talked about rebuilding our depleted nuclear warhead arsenal. For decades, there has been a  global effort to reduce the number of nuclear bombs on the planet. Donald Trump wants to make more of them. It would be foolish to simply dismiss the possibility that Trump could start a nuclear war. I have someone in my family who dismisses such a possibility. “Oh, his advisors would stop him from doing anything like that.” How can you NOT be afraid of Donald Trump’s very real cavalier attitude about nuclear weapons and yet be categorically terrified of Syrian refugees? How is that even humanly possible?

All I can do is hope that people change their minds. People have to change their belief systems. They have to recognize that having a conservative mindset is not healthy, that it’s dangerous and harmful. But, I just can’t see that happening. I can’t see them embracing minorities and the sick and the poor, which is what liberals do. They see that as weakness. And they don’t want to associate with weakness. They want to see themselves as superior, as more capable. They believe that they succeed by the merits of their own hard work. Society and infrastructure and government play no role in their success–only their failures. All they need is God, their family, and for government to get out of their way. I don’t know how to make conservatives realize that they are not weaker for lifting up their fellow man. I don’t know how to make conservatives see that Democrats believe in hard work, too. I don’t know how to make a white person feel comfortable admitting that he shares the same hopes and dreams as a black person, when he has been led to believe his whole life that he is inherently better than that black person. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to make conservatives who are afraid of people of color see that they have more in common with the middle class Muslim family that lives next door to them than they do Donald Trump. I don’t know how to restore dignity and hope to our middle class. I don’t know how to reduce poverty. I don’t know how to make our society better.

All I can do is drag myself out of bed every day and bear witness to what goes on in America’s name.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go take a shower.