It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I was deeply troubled when President Trump was re-elected. However, on the day after the election, I didn't binge on potato chips, I didn't get drunk, and I didn't run screaming into the yard, although I considered all of those things. Instead, in the tradition of essayist David James Duncan and poet Thomas Lynch, I wrote a rant.
What is a rant? "To talk or say in a loud, wild, extravagant way; declaim violently; rave," Webster says. A rant is not reasonable. It is full of vitriol, bile, and barely-suppressed rage.
In his memoir, My Story as Told by Water, David James Duncan composed several rants—long, complex, outraged paragraphs—on behalf of the rivers and forests of his native Oregon that had been polluted by paper mills and clearcut by loggers. Thomas Lynch wrote a curse-poem rant against his ex-wife, a masterpiece of invective that was wildly popular with audiences. Until the day Lynch's son was present for a reading, and Lynch considered what it might be like for the young man to hear this diatribe against his mother. Lynch resolved never to read the piece aloud again.
Rants are serious business. A friend told me said that posting a rant publicly is "pressing the nuclear button."
I considered not sharing my rant at all. I'm usually very careful with my speech. I've seen the damage words can do. And, on October 26, just before the election, I had posted a blog in which I had exhorted myself and others to refrain from finger-pointing, name-calling, and demonizing those with whom we disagree. I urged us to "eat of the fruit that makes for peace."
But there is also the matter of speaking the truth as you see it.
And, the intensity of emotions that I felt the day after the election—fear, frustration, disappointment, disgust, anger, bewilderment—seemed to demand some kind of response.
Because it felt like a curtain of darkness was falling over our nation.
I had experienced some of the same emotions on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob broke through police lines and attacked the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. The mob had come from a "Save America" rally organized by supporters of President Trump to challenge the results of the 2020 election.
I felt angry at President Trump's repeated attempts to undermine the democratic process. I was afraid this riot was the start of a civil war.
Two people died as a result of the attack. Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran from Southern California, who was shot and killed by Capitol Police as she climbed through a broken window just outside the House chamber. Officer Brian Sicknick, a twelve-year veteran of the Capitol Police force, who died of injuries inflicted by rioters.
One legislator, Illinois representative Adam Kinzinger, later told The Atlantic that as the mob invaded the House of Representatives on January 6, he "could feel a darkness descend over the Capitol." One of his friends in Congress, the Oklahoma Republican Markwayne Mullin, heard the same report of descending darkness from members of the Capitol Police.
I worry about what a second Trump administration will mean for our country. I fear a continued rollback of women's rights and an escalation of violence against LGBTQ persons and people of color. I fear a massive deportation of immigrants, some of whom are American citizens.
Looming over these is my fear of what will happen to all of humanity if climate change goes unchecked in the richest nation in the world.
Dread for the whole earth wakes me in the night.
The park we visit every week, Hudson Mills, through which our beloved Huron River flows, still shows scars of a 2022 summer storm that was most likely intensified by climate change. Eroded banks. Re-routed trails. Mature oak trees snapped and twisted and thrown down like pick-up sticks. Weather watchers reported 60-75 mph winds and "gustnados"—small whirlwinds which form as an eddy in a thunderstorm outflow along the leading edge of a line of storms.
The trees in our own yard were spared.
That time.
I worry about how we are harming the earth, our only home, harm that will get worse in the next four years under President Trump, who backed us out of the Paris Climate Accord, and whose allies spent his first term trying to dismantle environmental protections for rivers, lakes, wetlands, and wilderness.
And now Los Angeles is burning.
This, too, is serious business.
So, here it is.
A rant from a conflict-averse, usually cautious and circumspect pastor. If nothing else, the rant can serve as a record of what the day after the election of 2024 felt like to one lover of the earth. And perhaps the second half of the essay can serve as a recipe for the days to come.
Except for a few tweaks, and an addendum prompted by the fact that Epiphany and the anniversary of the Capitol attack fall on the same date, the rant is as I wrote it on Wednesday morning, November 6, 2024.
* * *
When I imagine the worst for the years that are to come—my river permanently poisoned by PFAS—the oaks in my yard, already weakened by wilt, toppled by climate-change-driven high winds—the cattail swamps I admire daily dredged and developed because the MAGA Supreme Court has made federal wetland protections harder to enforce—the Lake Michigan shoreline I love soaked with Enbridge-ferried oil—the soil that produces the food I eat depleted and poisoned by overuse of fertilizers and chemicals while farmers cannot sell their grain to China anyway because tariffs have shut down the market—when we no longer have clean water to drink or fresh air to breathe or food to eat or trees that hold the earth together—when, after slowly watching the earth around me die in a thousand ways—I imagine saying to this generation of calculating, sycophantic Republican leaders and to the Christian pastors who disregarded Trump's flagrant immorality and told their congregations to vote for him, thereby re-electing a lying, lawless, brawl-loving narcissist, whose plan to deal with the ticking time bomb of climate change is to deny that it exists—I imagine saying I TOLD YOU SO.
I imagine siting in my tree-strewn yard choking on foul air guarding my diminished larder and saying with perfect coldness to family members and friends and everyone else who voted for him I TOLD YOU SO.
You were warned that this would happen.
You were warned about the increasing heat, the raging wildfires, the rising waters, and the increasing intensity of the storms.
You were told by scientist after scientist around the world that this would happen.
And it has.
But I TOLD YOU SO is thin soup. To imagine saying I TOLD YOU SO over and over cannot sustain soul and body through the hard years that are to come.
Better to stock my soup with the bone broth of kindness, simmered for long hours and stirred with hope. Better to stuff the pot with the earthy pulp of potatoes, the yellow coins of carrots, sweet chunks of parsnip, fibrous celery, translucent onion, crumbled bay leaf, and whole peppercorns, all of which, with the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, and self-control— when stirred and simmered together and then scooped, steaming, into bowls, will fill the mouth with richness and nourish the soul.
Better to get the stepstool and take the heavy ceramic bread bowl down from the top shelf, and bake a loaf of honey-whole wheat bread leavened with the yeast of faith that God is still at work in the world. Oh, the nutlike sweetness of the wheat germ! Oh, the feel of the dough as I knead it! So warm and pliable under my hands.
The dough will rise in the oven under an old cotton tea towel that was once a calendar hanging on my mother-in-law's kitchen wall. 1968. Another dire year when our country seemed to be tearing itself apart. We survived that.
If the kitchen is cold, the dough will rise slowly, but it will rise. I will punch down and shape the dough into loaves, folding the ends and hiding the crease on the bottom, and ease the loaves into pans. Then I will wait while the dough rises again. When the bread has been baked, the moist slices will fall away from the knife, we will slather them with butter, and take a huge bite.
Soup and bread together on a bleak November day.
This, too, can be imagined. And must be, if we are to be sustained through the years that are to come. We need strength of body and soul to save ourselves and the earth itself from the worst of ourselves.
And if, when I bite on a peppercorn, the savage flavor momentarily causes me to wince, so be it. No man, however powerful, rules forever. The Trump presidency, too, will pass. Behold, all flesh is as the grass, the requiem says, and no one escapes. Only the word of God stands forever, and we will, each of us, be called to account.
In the meantime, may we imagine a future in which all people, and not just the rich and the powerful, feast on abundance. May we eat and pray and work for the day when what we dream more nearly resembles a heavenly banquet, the restoration of paradise, the upside-down, wrong-righting coming of the kingdom of God.
* * *
Addendum – January 11, 2025 – Week of the Epiphany and the anniversary of the Capitol Attack
In his eulogy for President Jimmy Carter, Vice-President Walter Mondale summarized their four years together with the credo they had used to guide the work of their administration: "We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace."
The contrast with President Trump could not be starker.
I believe that the election and re-election of President Trump represent a frightened pushback against the progress our nation has made in the last fifty years toward civil rights, gender equality, and environmental protection. The same pushback has occurred in other countries around the world.
Fearful elites inflame others to preserve their own power.
In the Bible, the gospel writer Matthew tells how King Herod and the religious leaders in Jerusalem were afraid because the wisemen had told them that a "new king" had been born. Jesus. Who would welcome the outcast and bless the poor. Seeing this "new king" as a threat, Herod tried to get the wisemen to reveal the whereabouts of the baby. They did not. Herod was so incensed that he ordered the massacre of all children in Bethlehem under two years of age. Warned in a dream, Joseph and Mary took the child by night and fled to Egypt, where they stayed until King Herod died.
Herod and his allies ultimately failed.
Because, aided by God, Jesus escaped. And the second time the powers-that-be thought they'd killed him for sure, he rose from the dead.
Another gospel writer, John, testifies to the final outcome: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."
God is not done with us yet.
God gets the last word.
If darkness is falling, shine a light.
Scriptures: Isaiah 40:1-8, Matthew 2:1-20, John 1:5.
Playlist: "Behold, all flesh is as the grass," A German Requiem, Johannes Brahms, 1868.
