This whole politics thing is really not my jam. It’s not that I like to bury my head in the sand while the fate of our country, and by extension the world, gets decided for me…but ok, yeah, it’s pretty much exactly like that. I mean, I vote, at least in the major elections, but getting into a political debate, dialogue, conversation, crazy-making-holiday-ruining-I-can’t-believe-we-all-share-blood-and-disagree-this-much-fight, or whatever else you might like to call it, is always at the bottom of my list. It doesn’t matter what the list is. Things That Will Ruin Thanksgiving, list. Reasons I Hate Watching the News, list. Things That Make Me Feel Hopeless, Powerless and Grumpy, list.

Basically, staying out of a political conversation is one of my superpowers. I know, I know, the personal is political, we have to use our voice, we have to pay attention. But I’m a pragmatist, and the one thing I remember from my college social psychology course is that the more you argue the opposite perspective with someone, the more they leave convinced that their original view was correct. So, then, you might reasonably argue that I am doing my part by keeping my mouth shut. At least, I’ve tried to argue that before. Of course, by trying to convince you of that, I’m probably just convincing you that the opposite is true. That it is my responsibility to speak. But hear me out, I have my reasons.

I’ve gotten involved in politics precisely once before. It was the fall of 2008. Obama was running for election, Cari and I were students at Fuller Theological Seminary, and we were planning a rushed, top secret wedding. Those are not exactly two adjectives you hope to see used to describe your wedding. Rushed, to take advantage of the brief window of time when we had the right to get legally married before the good people of California voted to take it away from us with Proposition 8. Top secret, because if the administrators at Fuller found out about our relationship, let alone our marriage, they would have kicked us out while we were still full of student loans but devoid of degrees.

We made contributions to the No on Prop 8 campaign out of our teensy tiny grad school budget. We marched in rallies and made signs and t-shirts. We organized protests and massive (to us) distributions of letters of concern to the students at my Alma Matter Azusa Pacific urging them to vote and speak up for us. We even made cold calls to voters (ok, I am not 100% sure we did that last one… maybe I just signed up for it and then chickened out, but you get the idea, we were invested).  

Then we stood up in front of our closest friends and family and vowed to love another until death do us part, while our brave pastor married us without the support of her congregation, but by the power invested in her by the state of California, nine beautiful words. Then, just two days later we watched as some of those very same people who had been at our wedding voted to take away our right to marry. “It’s not personal,” they said. “We support you, just not those people,” they said. But you see, it was very, very personal. We are those people.

Which is why I must now break my eight year vow of silence and speak.

Friends, family, internet readers, we cannot elect Donald Trump as president of this country. We simply cannot stand by and watch as someone whose entire platform is the fear of the “other” runs for or, God forbid, wins, the most powerful position in the world. This has been tried before, and it has not gone well. He is not the first man to mobilize a nation behind the idea that a group of people in the minority are responsible for all the things that are wrong in that country and that all you have to do to make things right for you is to get rid of the people who don’t look like you, act like you, or pray like you. This is the stuff of genocides, the Holocaust, internment camps. This is some scary shit. The fear of the “other” is a tried and true method of united a bunch of people who wouldn’t otherwise agree with each other around the central idea that we would all be better off without “them,” whoever they are. If we had all the power, we’d be richer, safer, happier. Kick them out, keep them quiet, lock them up. When we make someone the “other,” we dehumanize them, and when we dehumanize someone, it is far too easy to justify whatever we might do to them in the name of protecting ourselves. And that, folks, is not just the stuff of nightmares, it is the stuff of history.

You know this, I think you do. By and large it appears, at least from Facebook, as though most of the people I know are at least on some level concerned that this man would not make a terrific leader of the free world. But here’s the piece it took me a little longer to come to: we cannot move to Canada.

I love Canada, don’t get me wrong. We took a trip to Vancouver Island a few years ago with our friends Lisa and Shasta when our son Logan and their daughter Ella were still babies and our second children were still romanticized maybes instead of precisely 1/2 of the chaos in our lives. The kids played on the endless beach out front of our hotel and every hike ended in a waterfall. They had idyllic little towns where goats grazed on thatched roofs, and it was just all around ridiculously perfect. And yes, I saw that article about that island in Canada where they are begging the fleeing Americans to come move there and pointing out that the houses are like a dollar per square foot and the paid family leave actually lets you stay home long enough to get to know your baby before handing them off to a stranger (don’t get me started on this one because it’s really, really close to my heart right now). I know we crashed Canada’s immigration site after super Tuesday because I went to see for myself and sure enough, they had a message up apologizing for the delays due to unexpected volume. I get it, I do. I mean- goats on a roof, paid family leave, cheap houses, kind leaders, say no more. Count me in. Except we can’t leave. We have to stay and fight.

We must use whatever power and privildge we have to be a voice of reason, compassion, mutual respect and humankindness. As a white person, born in this country and raised in the dominant religion of this country, I’ve got plenty of power of privilege. Enough to be able to think about moving to Canada, and enough to know that I have to stay. Because as Martin Luther Kind Jr. once said: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

And I do, I absolutely remember their silence. When my marriage was up for public vote, and all those ads ran about how the homosexuals were ruining the fabric of marriage, family, and this country; when I sat in those classes at Fuller and listened to my professor call being gay an abomination to the Lord that belonged back in the DSM as a psychiatric condition, let me tell you, their silence was deafening.

So let us be brave, my beautiful ones. Let us have those hard conversations. Let us speak up for our Muslim neighbors, our black neighbors, our neighbors who have immigrated here from places near and far. Let us march, let us vote, let us dream, let us fight. Let us use our voices, both now, to help prevent this terrible fear from winning power over our country, and after, in the event that it does. Now is not the time for silence, because silence is consent. If we do nothing- if we say nothing- our neighbors will have no choice but to assume we agree that they do not matter, or belong, or deserve. And they do, and we do, and you do. And now is the time.