It Could Be So Much Better Than This

Friends, this week’s podcast episode is not for kids - meaning please don’t listen if you have kids within earshot. I want to give you a content warning because I talked about SA and all kinds of current events that aren’t easy for any of us, so if you need to pass on this one, please take care of yourself. There’s nothing you can’t read below, however.

I feel like I am in a world that is becoming harder to comprehend by the day. I know I am not alone in that experience, and I know this is painful for all of us. I don’t believe anyone wants a world full of this much chaos, violence and vitriol.

There are a lot of enraged, volatile people out there, and a lot of hurting, exhausted people. I don’t particularly want to talk about Charlie Kirk anymore - I talked about him in the essay this week and in the podcast - but I will say this once more so it’s very clear: political violence is never okay, and no one should be assassinated for expressing their views. Ever. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about people whose views we agree with, or views we abhor. When it happens in our country - and it does - it is never a thing to celebrate. It is never a thing to take lightly. It makes all of us less safe. It is not the sign of a healthy republic.

For those of you who feel devastated because you are in agreement with his views, perhaps you might be able to understand what it felt like when Melissa Hortman - Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita - her husband Mark, and their dog Gilbert were assassinated in their home back in June by a MAGA Trump supporter. Vance Boelter dressed up as a police officer and knocked on their door in the early hours of the morning on June 14th. When they answered, he shot and killed them in the doorway of their home. My heart hurts thinking about the last seconds of their lives - the terror, the panic, the confusion and the violence.

He had already been to Senator John Hoffman’s house and shot him nine times, and also shot and wounded his wife, Yvette. Their grown daughter Hope was there as well. They survived, but Senator Hoffman has a long and difficult recovery ahead, and no doubt all three of them will be dealing with the trauma of what happened for a very long time.

Boelter had a list of 45 additional Democratic politicians he intended to kill. This was premeditated and devastating. I am someone who agreed with Melissa Hortman’s feelings about the country and ways we can make things better. I was dismayed to see that her assassination - along with the other horrendous details of this man’s rampage that morning and his further murderous plans to wreak havoc - did not receive the attention they warranted. Not by a long shot.

The President refused to call Governor Walz to express his condolences. “I could be nice and call, but why waste time?” That’s what he said when a journalist asked if he’d spoken to the governor. He did not “waste his time” calling to express his condolences to the Hortmans’ grown children, either. Flags were not flown at half-staff, he did not attend the funeral, nor did the Vice President. Vance did not even acknowledge their deaths.

Please try to remember the President and Vice President are supposed to be the leaders of the entire country. They are public servants and they work for the people - our tax dollars pay their salaries, whether they need the salaries or not. The job of President and Vice President is not to care only for the people who vote for them. It would seem that someone should let them know immediately, and the rest of the administration while they’re at it.

Right after news of the Hortmans’ assassinations broke, Senator Mike Lee of Utah got on X and quipped “Nightmare on Walz Street” - a post he deleted only after Senators Tina Smith (D-MN) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) talked to him in person, and expressed their absolute horror at his callousness, and grief over losing a cherished friend. I’d like to think we can all agree no one should need to be told that is not funny - that it takes a shocking lack of empathy and decency to post a thing like that in the face of a tragedy of such enormous proportions.

Melissa Hortman taught Sunday school by the way. She was a mom. Her children lost both parents and their dog in the front hall of their family home in the most unimaginable way possible. Please note, not a single Democrat got on the airwaves after all the details came to light and said, “THIS IS WAR! WE ARE AT WAR WITH THE RIGHT-WING LUNATICS WHO WANT US DEAD!”

Not. One.

The gaslighting is a lot, it really is.

This will be hard for those of you who liked the man, but try to stay with me. It is a very strange experience to see people in the “spiritual community” and the yoga community praise a man who said things that were openly racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. I linked so many examples of words coming directly out of his mouth in the essay. People will say, “Oh, you’re taking clips out of context” - but there is no context where it is okay or legitimate to say, for example, that Michelle Obama does not “possess the brain-processing power to be taken seriously” and that she “stole a slot from a white person.” Or that “the Civil Rights Act was a mistake” - other than a racist one. That’s the only context.

You can’t say women over thirty are not attractive in the dating pool, and young girls who want to go to college should really only bother if they’re going in order to meet a husband - without being a misogynist. That’s the only context.

There is no context where you can say “gay people are an abomination” and not be homophobic and bigoted. If you want to say you’re just repeating what you learned in Leviticus, allow me to remind you - not everyone is Christian. Not everyone reads the Bible or believes in the same god or prays the same way, or at all - and that is okay.

We don’t all have to believe the same things. That is why America was formed - our forepeople came here and stole this land from the Native Americans to avoid religious persecution in England. It’s ironic that they justified it by saying God told them to do it, but I know we don’t do irony anymore, so I’ll just sob quietly to myself. Also - they didn’t want to be ruled by a king. Funny, huh?

Look, we can’t do this. This is not sustainable and it’s so wasteful. We get such a short amount of time here on earth and it’s the height of ingratitude to spend it telling other people how to live. Believe me, none of us are in any position to do that. None of us. You are not living your life well enough or perfectly enough or ethically enough or kindly enough to tell anyone else what to do. I promise I’m right about that. You have plenty of work to do just keeping your own side of the street clean, and when you feel like you’ve got that pretty well managed, then you can start thinking of ways to make things even better for other people.

We don’t have to agree on everything, but we do have to be able to get along, and we do have to be able to agree on basic things. If we look up and the sky is blue, we have to be able to agree on that. We can’t have half the people saying, “The f**k it is, it’s chartreuse, open your eyes, a*****e!” That’s just not going to work.

If someone says, “Men are smarter and better-equipped to run things than women so they should rule the world and women should just go pop out babies and submit to their husbands,” we have to be able to agree that’s not true and it’s not cool. These are not “differences of opinion” these are things that make people unsafe. Because if you don’t push back on that, then I lose my rights and so does my daughter and men can just grab you by the pussy. Some already do, so going backwards is a terrifying proposition. We need to agree that isn’t okay. Also, men have been running the world for a very long time and I don’t think it’s going all that well.

We need to agree our children getting shot at school week after week is not okay, and do something about it, together. We need to take care of the planet. We need to take care of each other, and make sure we have affordable healthcare and a safety net. We can’t have media personalities talking about lethally injecting people experiencing homelessness in our country, and then apologizing, oops.

We can’t have people who want to incite war. We need to stop this madness and realize we are not the enemy of one another. We may not like each other or agree about a lot of things and that’s fine, but I’m not trying to kill you, okay? And I don’t want open borders and rampant crime, that’s a b******t story. No one wants that. Please for the love of god stop watching Fox News. Please. They will be the death of us.

You don’t have to like me, but your people may not be in power forever, you know? Maybe just care about your neighbors the way you hope they’ll care about you one day when the pendulum swings again. Or if you feel like you were neglected or dismissed when your neighbors were in power, be the better team. Lead the way.

But let’s not destroy ourselves, because that’s what they want. “They” being the people pulling the strings here. The people who want us to hate each other so we don’t focus on what they’re doing. If bullets start flying, you never know who’s going to get hit. That’s the problem with war, no one wins. I don’t hate you, but I hate what’s happening to our country.

I hate seeing some of my friends forget basic stuff. You can’t be a racist and a decent person at the same time. That’s just basic math.

Okay, I did my best. Arithmetic from a broken heart.

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