“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” — Flannery O’Connor
last monday i pulled out my copy of American Boys, feeling the need for a physical reminder of withness/amongness (the amorphous, gay, insistent, irrespective of official policy kind). it is a collection of portraits of transmasculine / nonbinary people from all over the united states that i got many years ago; it was a seed that helped me recognize myself.
that man has suggested on multiple occasions to the Homeland Security Department that it would be wise to nuke hurricanes. i don’t let people who think they are more powerful than weather weigh in on my sense of self. i do feel frustrated by what feels like a colossal misuse of resources that could go toward so many other more life affirming things like housing, food, education, healthcare, mental healthcare, climate infrastructure…just to name a few.
the MAGA movement is nostalgic for an America that only ever existed in the imagination. the executive orders rolling out register abysmal denial and such a lack of regard for all that makes life possible. nostalgia points to misery to me, to a dissatisfaction with the present moment, to a sense of being stuck. my heart goes out to people for whom that is the only outlet. may they somehow find it within themselves to imagine something in front of them that isn’t so destructive. “If the world wasn’t so full of dead folks maybe those of us that’s trying to live wouldn’t have to suffer so bad.”1
in the meantime:
Reverend Foster’s eulogy, James Baldwin, Another Country, p. 121 ↩