a struggle to empathize, to walk in the shoes

Trump, and Me

The empath within me struggles and can’t really get there,

to where a lot of Americans must have been,

to feel as those who felt the 8 years of Obama to be a nightmare,

to a place where I can imagine Donald Trump as a strong father

who will take care of us, one who will fight off

the demons of modernity,

of losing to other countries in trade and jobs,

an Odysseus who will assert our will upon others,

and acknowledge no cost to us, or to existence,

a Trump who champions the sides of us 

that live the id, that deny the other,

that blame elites for the loss of a good job,

that dismiss the uncomfortable truth 

that many of those jobs went to machines,

thus to a better bottom line for the company:

the elites still to blame, but capitalism and profit rule them,

how much easier it is to blame a foreign worker

than a machine or a CEO, capitalism itself,

I can almost walk in the shoes of those

that want the past to become the present,

and the present to then become the future,

a conservatism to the extreme,

a resisting of change that they don’t like,

a hoping to be rescued from it,

I want to empathize and understand,

yet it hurts my heart and my head

to imagine so much antithetical to what I believe,

to what I feel to be the truth:

we are changing the climate with our actions,

tax cuts for the rich do not make the world better,

rights for others than those like me make all better, not worse,

it is just wrong to reduce women, people of color,

or those with a different path to God, into lesser than us,

we only honor God when we love the other as ourselves,

when we love our self because of what we give,

not because of what we take.

by Henry H. Walker

January 20, ‘17