I have to confess that on many days, I wish I were a MAGA.
I imagine how liberating it must be not to have to think critically about the events of the day; to cede my opinions on immigration, healthcare, the economy, and every other critical matter to those of a single man and a single network. I could turn off my mind and live inside a comfortable, curated fiction, unfettered by anything that might change the story I’ve been told is true.
It would be such a relief not to have to wade into the deep waters of complexity and nuance and to stay safely in the shallows of prejudice and stereotype; to be handed an expansive list of my enemies and adversaries; those whose gains I could see as my loss and whose eradication I could believe is necessary.
What it must be like, living within a narrative that the poor and hungry are all lazy grifters, that immigrants are all shiftless criminals, that gay people are all predators and deviants, that pro-choice liberals are all Godless baby-killers. That short-hand dehumanization would make it so very easy to abide by the removal of their rights and applaud the silencing of their voices.
What a relief it would be to see myself as perpetually oppressed, despite my stratospheric privilege; to come to believe that although I have been handed every opportunity and advantage my pigmentation, birthplace, and religion affords, I am fully under siege.
I’m sure life would be so much less stressful if I could be freed from any empathy, to simply not be burdened in any way by the suffering of other human beings who don’t look, talk, think, believe, worship, or love the way I do. I could sail easily through this life, never needing to ask the question, “What’s it like to be someone else?”
What a relief it would be to be able to flatly dismiss every single effort of kindness, compassion, generosity, gentleness, equity, charity, and simple decency as “woke,” and exempt myself from any of them.
If I were a MAGA, I could applaud the violence of ICE and the weaponization of the Military, believing that I was safe from their terror because of my party affiliations or voting history.
If I were a MAGA, I could absolve myself from any culpability for the damage inflicted on the environment, for the injury to marginalized people, for the dismantling of our elemental liberties, even though my votes and my advocacy made it all possible. I could withdraw from reality, avoid the news, and be blissfully ignorant of the pain I partnered in creating.
If I were a MAGA, I could ignore my party’s prolific criminality, its protection of rapists, its ignoring of the Constitution, its partnering with murderous dictators, its legislating of religion, because I’d decided that a righteous holy war justified it all.
If I were a MAGA, I could pin my every hope to a vile, miserable, traitorous, barely literate conman who lacks a single noble impulse; one whose legal and moral crimes I could simply dismiss without reason because I’d decided without a single shred of quantifiable evidence that he was a good man of God.
I could place unwavering trust in him above experts and journalists, above doctors and scientists, above data and facts and objective truth—above even his words and his actions and my own eyes.
I could fall completely prostrate before this belligerent, miserable, felonious rapist messiah of grievance, casting aside all moral, spiritual, or legal standards that I’d had for anyone else.
Yes, if I were a MAGA, my path would certainly be smoother, my sleep easier, and my story simpler; free from concern for the wounds or worries of anyone else beyond me and mine.
But I refuse to let irrational fear be the single engine my life runs on, to be addled by blind hatred for those whose experiences differ from mine, to walk around with a scalding contempt for the vulnerable, the outcast, the different, and to believe I am the center of the universe.
I know that the world is bigger than America, that diversity makes us better, that we are all connected here, that compassion is the antidote to what afflicts us, and that loving my neighbor and my enemy are my highest calling.
And while any of that remains true, I could never be a MAGA.
I’ll just have to be human being who gives a damn.
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