 Garbage, Grievance, and the Gospel of Cruelty Enduring the bully-in-chief. Again.
I’ve spent my whole life learning the language of
bullies. Not from books or movies, but from the way my small body learned to
brace before my mind even understood the danger. From the way a room could
shift, sharpen, turn hostile without a single word spoken. Bullies raised me,
shaped me, tried to script my story before I ever got the chance to write it
myself. Their fingerprints are pressed into parts of me I’ve spent decades
trying to soften. And a few days ago, Trump did what he always does —
bullied, demeaned, dehumanized — but this time it hit a place in me I thought
had finally gone still. Harsher. Deeper. Like someone pressed a thumb into an
old bruise that never fully faded. He spat out two cruelties without blinking
— the R-word degrading jab tossed off like a bored reflex, and then,
half-asleep in that cabinet room, he still found the energy to call Somalis
in America “garbage.” It was the degrading jab that stung first, but it was “garbage”
that lodged under my ribs. The way he said it. The way his whole cabinet
pounded on the table like rabid animals, cheering as he called American
citizens garbage. Mothers. Fathers. Kids who came here chasing the promise
this country claims to offer. The sound of that room erupting in approval
echoed something I’ve spent a lifetime trying to unlearn. Maybe it landed harder yesterday because it was a
Sunday in December — a gray, quiet day when everything in the air felt
reflective, and everything inside me felt a little more exposed, a little
more tender. Or maybe it’s because my dad came here as a teenager
from Lebanon with skin so dark people treated him like he didn’t belong in
the country he was desperate to build a life in. It didn’t harden him though.
He spent fifty years working for our Department of Defense. He loved this
country. He believed in it. He instilled that love and belief in me. But
Donald Trump, that evil piece of shit, would probably call him “garbage.” Or maybe it landed so hard because all week I’d
watched clip after clip of human beings being dragged out of cars and homes
and workplaces — pushed face-first into pavement, pinned, beaten, terrorized
by masked men performing his cruelty with their own hands. That kind of
brutality doesn’t rinse off. It settles into the part of your spirit where
fear and fury and grief knot together. And you start asking yourself how much
more a country can absorb before something inside us snaps. And like always, my first responders came roaring up
— the jokes, the mocking, the fury disguised as humor because sometimes humor
is the only shield I’ve got left. They show up fast, performing triage on the
softest parts of me. They’re my armor. They’re the part of me that refuses to
let anyone see that I’m hurting. But underneath all that noise — the sarcasm, the
sharp edges, the reflex to make pain look like a joke — something quieter was
stirring. The deeper ache, the one born in childhood, the one literally
etched into my face by the point of a heel at four years old, the one shaped
later by seven years spent kneeling beside autistic preschoolers whose
humanity deserved reverence, not ridicule… that ache simply waited. Watching.
Holding its breath. If I’m being honest, I was crying when I wrote this
yesterday. Full-on ugly crying, the kind that blurs the screen and turns
every sentence into a guess. It hit me all at once, this wave I’d been trying
to outrun. I realized I’d spent the whole week dodging my own reaction to his
cruelty — cracking jokes, writing satire, pretending the sting hadn’t reached
me. But it had. Deeply. Trauma doesn’t wait until it’s convenient. It arrives
when your guard is down, touches the oldest parts of you, and reminds you
that healing is never a straight line. Yesterday, I faced it. I let myself cry. I wrote
through it. And then I stepped outside and put up my Christmas lights because
I needed something warm and steady to tether myself to. Something bright and
human and steady. Something that reminded me there’s still light, even on
days like that one when everything feels too dark. Because the truth is, bullies have been the recurring
architecture of my life. They showed up in classrooms and living rooms, in
hallways and courtrooms, in the quiet places where I learned to shrink and
the loud ones where I learned to fight. I’ve spent years unlearning the lies
they taught me about myself. And I know I’m not alone. So many of you reading
this feel that same tightening in your chest when cruelty enters the room.
You feel the old bruise wake up. You feel your breath shorten. You’re not imagining it. You’re not weak. You’re not
alone. Bullies leave fingerprints time can’t fully lift. And here we are again, enduring a bully who thrives
on the harm he inflicts. Every day brings a new target, a new wound, a new
attempt to turn living, breathing human beings into objects for ridicule or
rage. It’s trauma on top of trauma. It’s a wound reopened every morning. The
heaviness isn’t imagined. It’s lived. And by the time you read this, he’ll have already
inflicted something new — another blow, another vile insult, another round of
state-sanctioned bullying — because that’s the rhythm of life under a man who
wakes up every day searching for fresh ways to wound. It sucks living this way. It’s hard. But Nietzsche was
right — what doesn’t kill you does make you stronger. Except for bears. Bears will kill you. That part isn’t
Nietzsche. That’s just… well… bears. But the joke isn’t enough anymore. Not yesterday. Not
today. Because the strength he forces us to build is a strength we never
asked for. Maybe it’s the cold. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s the headlines that
keep getting darker. Or maybe — let’s be honest — it’s because the evil,
idiot, fat-face felon, traitor rapist who bragged about grabbing women by the
pussy and unleashed his basement-dwelling incel horde on our Capitol is once
again sitting his cocktail-sauce-stained, syphilitic, sexual-predator ass behind
our Resolute Desk. And now he’s gathered a who’s who of the world’s
douchiest degenerates — a Smorgasburg of rapists, convicts, liars, grifters,
gaslighters, gropers, and goons — and handed them the power to decide whether
our children inherit a country that still works, still heals, still breathes. We’ve faced bullies before. He’s not new. He’s not
special. He’s not complicated. He’s the same sad, dangerous pattern in a
sloppier suit. And I know bullies. Believe me. I know how they operate. I
know how they implode. I know how they fall. My mother didn’t teach me how to sew or braid or
bake. She taught me how to read fear. How to dodge blows. How to rise with a
lip split open by the pointy end of her high heel when I was four. She taught
me how to disappear. And eventually, how to reappear stronger. She was my
first bully. My first battlefield. My original why. And when I finally stood up to her, when I took my
power back, I thought I’d ended that story forever. But life has a way of
introducing you to new bullies — the one at home I didn’t recognize until it
was nearly too late, the ones who tried to take my children’s house, the ones
who mistook my fear for surrender. Each time, I rebuilt. Each time, I rose.
Each time, I learned that endurance isn’t agreement. That surviving doesn’t
mean staying silent. That I’m made of more than what they tried to break. And that’s how I know we’re not powerless now. He
wants us numb. He wants us drained. He wants us to believe cruelty’s
inevitable. Bullies win by collapsing the spirit, not the body. But bullies
are beatable. Not because they soften, but because we harden in the right
places and stay soft in the ones they can’t reach. And I keep coming back to something I say all the
time: the only way out is through, and the only way through is together. I
believe that in the place inside me that refuses to go dark. Maybe that makes
me naive. Maybe it makes me foolish in a moment that feels unforgiving and
bleak. But I don’t care. I don’t give a single shit if hope makes me look
naive. I’ve survived too many people who should’ve destroyed me to abandon
the belief that most of us are still trying to be decent. Do we have a shocking capacity for cruelty in this
country? Yes. It still rattles me. But cruelty isn’t who we are at our core.
It’s loud, but it’s not the majority. Most of us still carry an unspoken
agreement to choose decency, to show up with kindness, to look out for one
another in quiet, everyday ways. Are the Trump cultists ever gonna see the light? No.
And honestly, who cares? The ones who cheer for cruelty might drown out a
room for a moment, but they’re not the ones carrying this country. They’re
not its core. We don’t need them. What we need is each other. We need to let ourselves
feel what we feel. Not because we’ve been pretending this isn’t heavy, but
because we so rarely give ourselves the grace to admit just how heavy it is.
This isolation we feel — it’s not imagined. It’s manufactured. It’s part of
the design. We’re not imagining the isolation — it’s the point.
That’s how they win: when they make us feel cut off from one another, when
the weight corners us into silence, when it convinces us we have to carry it
alone. But we’re not alone. We never have been. And that’s
our strength. That’s our resistance. That’s the thing they can’t touch. We don’t just endure — we push back. We call out
cruelty. We demand more from our leaders, from each other, from ourselves. We
insist on decency. We insist on kindness. We insist on a country where
everyone matters. It’s not easy, and it never will be. Some days we
fall down. Some days we fall apart. And that’s okay. What matters is that we
keep getting back up — and we keep showing up for each other. That’s how we move forward. That’s how we hold on to
hope. And in the end, that’s how we defeat the bullies — by refusing to stay
down, and by refusing to let them define who we are. We define ourselves. Together. |
