Can you say it?

 

It’s not a forgiveness thing. It’s an admit-it thing. Come clean. Just say it and we can then move on to the more important next steps.

You voted for him. Probably twice. It was naïve, ignorant, and selfish at best. We don’t need to discuss “at worst” today. In fact, your ability to admit what you know today in your heart was wrong directly correlates to how much we need to explore the worst-case scenario of why you did it.

Maybe you look closer at that tomorrow. For now, let’s focus on where we are today, a bit of how we got here, and more importantly how do we begin to fix it. To do that we’ve got to first stop pretending this is anything less than bat-shit crazy and incredibly dangerous. Correction, you need to stop pretending.

You fucked up. Say it. “I fucked up.” We need to hear it. You know this is cathartic and necessary in other facets of life and you cannot dismiss this moment as “politics.” It’s not. Don’t do that. The weight you feel will only grow if you do and that’s not good for anybody. You fucked up. Say it. Say it to yourself in the morning mirror and then tomorrow say it to a loved one that you know is dying for you to say it to them. You have them. You’re full of shit if you tell yourself you don’t know brothers or sisters who need to hear this. Or you should stop reading this.

This is not politics. This is not leanings on tax policy. This is far, far more serious and you know it.

If you want to explain what you hoped for or thought would happen when you made that decision in the dark that’s fine. You don’t have to. Frankly, that time has passed, at least for me. I needed to hear that on Wednesday Nov. 6, 2024. None of you offered it. Few of you celebrated or admitted it. You went dark. And then it got way, way darker in the United States than you either allowed yourself to imagine or even considered.

We did. We knew it was going to get dark because he told us he was going to shut a lot of lights off. He’s done much more than that. He’s yanked out the wiring in a lot of places that took decades to get wired. And we need to hear you say it. You fucked up. Own it.

We may be able to be great again if we can at least start by acknowledging the fuck-up. Noun and verb.