girlonahalfshill

Hi. This feels like a risky move, which says something. In an era when I see more and more of my friends asking you to unfriend them, to keep your content away from them, when you are seen as the crystallization of ignorance and hatred, when remaining friends with conservatives has become complicit with hatred, and familial to it: bigotry. I’m not here to defend your decisions, but I do think I understand you – at least a little bit.

A number of you aren’t defending everything that the current president has done or stands for. You’re not against all social distancing or mask-wearing, but you’re tired of feeling like you’re the only ones calling things into question. You’re tired of the hypocrisy that you see on the other side. Really, really sick and tired of it. You’re tired of being painted as backward and out of touch and ugly when you see just as much ugliness on the other side of the aisle. Yes, there are stories that are getting buried these days and some of those stories involve black people doing bad things. Those stories aren’t getting as much traction right now. Stories about liberals being violent aren’t acknowledged by many, but you see them and the fact that no one in that wider audience of public opinion is getting as angered by these events as you see when the reverse happens is all the fuel that is needed to stay defensive.

There is a bias at the moment and a hell of a lot of hypocrisy. People are aligning, for the most part, along party lines to gather in the same tribes that feel familiar and – and nothing is familiar. I’m in California and, at the moment, it feels like the entire world is on fire. It’s 10 AM and the sun is nowhere to be seen. It’s obscured to the point of ambiguity behind a curtain of smoke. I drive into Mill Valley for errands and see telephone junction boxes tagged with “Black Lives Matter” in one of the whitest communities on the face of the planet, outside of maybe Norway. Eleven million of us have lost our jobs, even more are hanging onto them with anxiety as our savings and security are depleted. And, oh yeah, the Coronavirus.

Right and wrong are and aren’t a subjective matter. We all pay attention to some of the news because the news cycle has never churned at a faster rate and we’re all only capable of taking in so much information before our heads explode. It makes sense that we’ve all tucked into our comfortable stories in an era of discomfort. Yes, stories about minorities in the wrong are less popular right now in many media circles, but that has not always been the case and giving stories about police brutality of minorities more exposure is a long, long ways away from actually protecting minorities from police brutality, but it’s a step in the right direction. Does it mean that everything is fair right now? No. Is it the whole story? No.

We currently have a president who distills this world into digestible bites for you. He literally calls out who he deems to be “good” and “bad” and in a world where we can feel overwhelmed shopping for groceries, or clothes, where the money that we may have earned working for a bank that invests a portion of its funds in oil companies that have dodged environmental regulations, where our strawberries were reliant on undocumented labor and our artichokes were flown in from Chile with a larger carbon footprint and more globe trotting experience than we’re managed in the last ten years, when our clothes were purchased through the labor of women in Cambodia or Malaysia because China’s labor costs have risen, women who will never own clothing as expensive as the items they make, who work in cramped, un-ventillated quarters and who know that if they don’t show up for work, they will be replaced. When we know that our land was once lived on by generations of Native Americans and we don’t really want to know the full history of which tribe. Because we are exhausted trying to do our very best today and to figure out how to take care of what feels manageable today and the people shunning you for not caring have set their own limits on how much they can care and they’ve erected that fence and set you outside of it.

The world is more complicated than Trump pretends that it is and it’s more complicated than most of us can comfortably acknowledge on a daily basis. It’s not all clear cut lines and pretending that it is will lead us to the wrong conclusions. I know a number of you and, sure, there are some conservatives out there who are holding to their flags and screaming, but there are a lot of you who are just trying to do your best and this is what your best looks like right now. I want to let you know that I’m here with you – every bit as much as I am here with my friends who are black or LatinX or gay or straight or the admittedly majority of my friends who are white and straight. I’m just going to ask you to try to let go of that anger that you’re feeling toward the media, toward the injustice that you see, toward the hypocrisy – that you take a step away from it for a moment and that we all admit that we’re scared.

But we don’t have to be scared of one another.

And, dear liberal friends – for those of you who are upset that Joe Biden isn’t progressive enough, that Kamala Harris was a DA and then Attorney General and that her tough on crime background disappoints you and who feel betrayed by the left again since Bernie was your guy and you think he was iced out of the nomination again, and who feel disoriented and betrayed by the inclusion of Republicans in the DNC, kindly, GET OVER YOURSELVES. Pretty, pretty please. Our next president needs – correction, we all need a national leader who can stand before the American people as a whole, who can acknowledge our differences and begin to weave us back together. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party does not represent the majority of this country and while it’s easy to believe that it does, or it “should” from the comfort of our homes in Marin County, Marin County and San Francisco are not representative of the nation as a whole and we need to shake off our myopic pride and help ourselves and our fellow citizens step back from the edge of this cliff with understanding. It’s a good thing that Joe Biden isn’t as radical some of us might want him to be. It’s a good thing that Kamala Harris has a law enforcement background; do you think that a Democrat from California would belong on a national ticket otherwise? It’s an incredible thing that so many life-long Republicans had the guts and the ethical commitment and patriotism to break ranks and speak at the Democratic National Convention. They are all answering the moment. We need to as well.