Deliver us from evil.

 

Election Day, November 5, 2024

There must be wildfires somewhere. The air quality here is bad. The smoke is oppressive.

I’m depressed because of the smokey air outside, the election, and losing my sister.

Despite all the reporting and commentary on what to expect if Trump wins, and despite what he says he’ll do, I don’t know what to expect.

I voted for Kamala this morning. I am not watching the returns tonight or even checking the news after the polls close. I’ll wait until after morning meditation, even though the vote count might not be over for days, if it is ever over.

I’m not confident. They keep saying its a toss up in all the battleground states.

Do fifty percent of voters have no idea what authoritarianism is?

Yes.

Do fifty percent really want what is, in effect, authoritarianism?

I don’t know. Apparently?

I pray — right now I pray — for a defeat of evil, deliverance from evil.

I pray and I post, “Deliver us from evil.”

Forgive me for praying in public, like the hypocrites

Wednesday 4:11AM 

Quiet, cloudy. The trees outside the kitchen window are agitated. I make coffee and pour a cup and meditate, or try to.The quiet is disturbing. When Obama won, we knew because of the cheering outside, and people were cheering again in 2020 when Biden defeated Trump.

There has been no cheering tonight. I didn’t think we would know who won on election night.

I finally look at the New York Times:

“Trump on verge of victory with swing state wins” He won Pennsylvania and Georgia and only needs one more state to win.

Both Houses appear to be Republican, maybe? We won’t know for sure until God knows when.

We have been taken over by a cult. We will be governed by a corporate state headed by a man whose history we know all too well. I don’t want to list all the reasons he should never have been considered as a candidate. You already know and you voted for him, or some of you did.

We now know that the majority has selected the most despicable man to ever run for the office of President. He is old and unhealthy but he has a young sidekick who can carry out the agenda of Project 2025, and he has the Supreme Court and maybe both Houses of Congress.

People were so sick of a status quo that wouldn’t deliver the American Dream to their front door fast enough they decided to burn the house down while we are all still inside it.

I don’t know if I have the strength to carry a heart this heavy and I don’t know how long my brain can maintain sanity or even aspire to peace of mind in a country that is in the grip of a collective psychosis. 

My sister believed in Trump, maybe because her husband, my beloved brother in law, believed Trump — until Covid killed him. Maybe she believed in Trump because the TV preachers she liked said Trump is anointed by God to be our new King David. 

I can’t explain it and I can’t explain her and I wouldn’t try. Not to you. Not tonight. Betty wasn’t typical in any way, so she wasn’t a typical Trump supporter — if there is such a thing — but that doesn’t matter. She and my brother in law went to one of his rallies in Fort Myers and they laughed, and clapped, and shouted, and had fun joining in with what she called “patriotic chanting.” She wasn’t strange. As a member of the Trump cult she was in the majority. The new normal.

A couple of years ago I went to a small town North Carolina for my nephew’s wedding. It was my first visit at my sister’s house there. A big Confederate flag and a TRUMP billboard stood on the highway. Nice neighborhood.

My sister and I started to argue about Trump, but one of my nieces made us stop and go to bed. Another one reminded me that after the 2016 election I had posted that anyone who voted for Trump can unfriend me and go to Hell. She said it made her afraid I wouldn’t want to talk to her any more. I felt terrible and I regretted what I had written in anger.

I don’t know how the Trump Corporation administration is going to affect me personally. It might not have much of an effect, or I could get arrested for an act of conscience, if it comes to that and I have the courage. I don’t know what to expect and my imagination is only serving overcooked paranoia tonight. Lead us not into trials.

The poor will suffer the most, as always — the poor, the refugees, the undocumented immigrant, single women with children, children, Black women in general, those who cannot afford healthcare, those considered extremists. 

He said he’ll be a  dictator on Day One. We are headed into a waking nightmare. I try to find hope in the knowledge that his record on keeping promises is not very good.

My heart is heavy and sick and my brain is a mountain of burning tires, but I will continue to make art and pray like a monk in my urban cave, in our decaying empire, in the midst of a global moral plague, in a free range psych ward run by psychotics, on the floating island of garbage that America seems doomed to become.

Lead us not into trial. 

Deliver us from evil.