To Trump Supporters,
I understand you now. My breakthrough is this: the way the recovery community treats an addict or alcoholic is the way I ought to treat you.
I’ll say this: the people I have met in the rooms of Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous are the most loving people I know. They live the principles of compassion, generosity, and humility. They do more good in the world than most churchgoers.
But they also recognize their limitations, especially when helping other drunks and addicts. They won’t force anyone into recovery, even if it means that person will die of their disease. The individual has to choose recovery.
That brings me to you. I’m realizing that I need to let you hit rock bottom before you will ever accept a hand up, a different way, or a better way. Any “helping” I do before you reach that point shields you from the consequences of your poor choices.
Your drug of choice is the self-affirming feedback loop of conservative media. The messages fed to you by these “dealers” validate your resentments, inflame your hatred, and give you a false “high” of superiority. They leave you comfortable in your ignorance and free of moral responsibilities—to the point where running down and shooting at peaceful protestors feels justified, as happened in my home city of Seattle last Sunday.
Your drug is intoxicating, liberating, and soothing at once. It makes sense of the world. It confirms to you that a black man writing forged checks is a deadly threat. Medical workers decrying lack of personal protective gear are whiners. Armed protestors at a state capital are patriots. Police are morally pure. Folks picketing because they can’t get their hair cut are defenders of liberty, while those protesting police violence are terrorists.
As with any drunk, or addict, you have a problem with the truth, mostly telling it to yourself. Even as Covid cases in your regions spike, jobs disappear, opioid addiction surges, and suicides by firearms climb, you insist nothing is wrong in “real” America. “Snowflakes,” advocating for gun control, prison, police, health, and/or education reform, they are the real threats whose heresies will ruin the “heartland,” and squash the “American dream.”
For those of you who do want to keep protesting for a haircut, a firearm, and against universal health care, I have learned from the recovery community that the loving thing to do is to let you. It may destroy you, yes, but it also might allow things to get bad enough that you realize you want something different. And like a drunk who has finally reached that jumping off point, we’ll be here, waiting for you with a seat at the table.
They tell you that if you join AA or NA, that you need to “buy a black suit.” It’s because not everyone makes it. Not everyone comes in from the cold. In that sense, I will respect your argument (fetishization) of liberty—even if you choose to use your liberty to utterly wreck yourself with your own fear, hatred, and resentment.
You are free to get high on your indignation, your victimhood, your superiority, but don’t ask us to participate in it and don’t destroy us in the process. Stop killing black and brown people. Stop supporting polices that result in their deaths. I’m not black or brown. I’m white. I love people who are black and brown. As my friends, they carry pieces of my heart within them, their safety is my safety, their well-being is my well-being. So please, destroy yourself, but leave them, and me, alone.
I once heard a recalcitrant teen in drug treatment say he was tired of all the adults telling him what he should do with his life. A veteran counselor chuckled and replied, “Kid, you should be grateful people are bothering to talk to you. It’s when they stop talking to you that you should really be worried.”
I’m just about there. I can’t turn my back on you, as much as I want to, because if I deny your humanity, (or anyone’s) then I’ve joined your side. That is what distinguishes us. So, my standing message will remain the same: there is a seat at the table, a place in our community for you, when you’re ready to take it. It requires you to recognize the humanity of all people and to stop debasing your own by destroying yourself and others. It requires you to quit your drug of choice, reexamine your fallacies, and let go of the twin idols of superiority and victimhood.
But like they say, it’s a free country. Just like a drug addict, needle in arm, passed out in a pool of vomit, you can choose to stay as you are, but we know how that story ends.