When Will We Hit Bottom?

Turn on the news and I can promise you some jaw dropping horror perpetrated by the current resident of the White House and his brigade of white supremacists. Every time I think we have found the bottom, like when he is tweeting about political rivals between “consoling” the victims of mass shootings, there is a lower place still, like the largest ICE raid in history on the first day of school in Mississippi- more parental separation. That has to be the bottom, right? It isn’t. We will not find the bottom until the day that man and his enablers in Congress are voted out of office. That is a promise.

I am in my 7th year of sobriety. I use the recovery lens a lot. I spend a lot of time thinking about rock bottom, my own- our country’s. The truth is, it took me a while to stop drinking after I had hit my rock bottom. I just didn’t know it then. Preceding my break up with booze was actually a whole lot of ground work that got me ready for life without it. And, I keep thinking about that for where we are in this country.

There is some really ugly truth sown into our flag and, staying with the sobriety metaphor, that is ours to reckon with. What we have been given in Donald Trump is a mirror that demands that we take ownership of that history, this reality, and that we choose a new path forward. Donald Trump is a symbol of our rock bottom. And, even though we still have 452 days until our chance to elect someone else, we need to take what we have seen in his reflection and spend those days getting to work.

In getting sober, the emotional work came first for me. I had to wrestle shame and internalized homophobia to the ground. I had to strip away all sorts of shit that society had taught me. Things that didn’t work and things that weren’t true and things that required an active numbing agent to live with. The country needs to do the same thing. We have been invited to wrestle with our very loud and present demons and call forward a better future. Getting sober required a searching inventory and making repairs and knowing and loving my brave and naked self, armor set aside.

So, let’s spend the next 452 days in the work together and on our own and in our families and at our work and out in nature. Let’s take an unvarnished look at the truth of a nation that is built on land stolen from its original keepers, constructed by humans that were stolen from their own land, and that has sucked the resources from the earth with an insatiable consumption. When I was drinking a lot, the best way not to feel hungover, was to stay drunk. I didn’t have to sit in how bad I felt.

When I did get sober, that sitting in the bad part was (still is) really hard without taking the edge off, but that is where all of the beautiful change happens. In the quiet stillness and space of truth.

My orientation to justice just so happened to follow my sobering up. I got curious about the realities of the gross inequality on parade. I studied things that intentionally aren’t taught in school. I started reading about the school to prison pipeline and really listening to the words in the music I had been consuming forever, the messages I had not received until then. When I did that, I found pain, I found shame, I found righteous rage, I found so much work to be done. The other thing I found was a whole bunch of folks out there doing the work.

One of the main reasons I drank was to take the edge off of the pain in this world. But what I didn’t understand then, was it took the edge off of the beautiful parts too. And, what can help bear the pain, is the beauty. Both are abundant and both bear making space to witness. This unnumbed world will split you open and sew you back up a thousand times a day and I think there is nothing more beautiful than scars that are proof of the brave life lived with an open heart.

Here is a complicated truth. I believe that this reckoning is a gift from Trump. His gross narcissism. His blatant racism. His unmitigated abuse of the planet for profit. We needed to look in this mirror to reckon with who we have always been and pull this toxic mess up by the roots and plant something healthy. Every day he shows us where our work is and what we need to do to make this a union that serves everyone it. We have 452 days to get in fighting shape. Get educated, build community, unearth all of our abusive secrets, put them in the light, own the truth, make repairs for harm done, and build the future.