I had a dream early, early Wednesday morning, after I had woken up to nurse the baby and saw who won the election. In my dream there was a toilet overflowing with rotting viscera, all slimy and purple and oozing--someone had tried to flush down a corpse. And I could look through the walls (like you can in a dream) to see that all the pipes were clogged with it, too.
I felt sick when I woke up, and that image has stuck in my mind ever since, as I read about the massive increase in hate crimes, the 81% of white evangelicals who voted for this man, the protestors who are called "peaceful" by one account and "rioting" by another. While Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock are new phenomena, the ugliness that they reveal about how white America treats her non-white citizens is as old as Columbus. And as their voices get louder, more and more people have tried to drown them out by yelling back that All Lives Matter, or that they needed to go through the proper channels before they can be taken seriously, or that it's not that bad after all and they should just be grateful that they're (at least theoretically) allowed to vote now.
And they try to shove the rotten corpse, the racism and violence and corruption, down into the toilet to flush it away and pretend it's done and over with, and the mess has been cleaned up. But it's not. And now we have to rip out the whole wall and replace all the plumbing.
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