Today I am grieving. Deeply. Painfully. Messily. Preciously. Not for the beloveds I’ve lost but for this world imploding about me. Maybe it’s nothing to grieve. Perhaps it was never worth the love I gave it. Maybe this country has always been the monster in the closet that everyone cowered from while smiling and pretending to get along.

I was privileged to be white in a white loving country, even though I didn’t know it while I was growing up. I didn’t realize how so many others felt. I ticked two of the boxes — woman and straight — and thought I had a clue.

Now as those around me are trying to stuff me and everyone with a vagina (used and out of date or not) back into a box, I am getting a glimpse of what all those not white, not straight, anyone who doesn’t fit the correct and constantly changing profile humans felt, but it is still just a tiny taste.Subscribed

This government may make me wear a dress or cover my head, may ensure I know my place and require than I bow and scrape to the master, but it likely won’t round me up, throw me in camps, separate me from my husband and children, and bus me or put me on a plane to a country I haven’t even visited. But … all bets are off. Maybe they’ll just shoot me, after all I am no longer productive sexually or financially. To the new regime, a regime that values the almighty dollar over everything else, I have no worth. I land in the debts column not assets.

So yeah, I am grieving, but not for myself. I’ve had a life lived under the possibility of freedom. I could move about the country and the world and while other countries weren’t always welcoming to ugly Americans, they didn’t close their doors which cannot but be far off.

Reading articles from other countries it’s pretty obvious that the ugly American is much uglier in the eyes of Canada, Europe, Australia, Asia, Mexico and Southern America. In less than a month, our country has accomplished something I would have never expected — isolation, pariah status, out in the cold alone — except of course for Russia. We are Russia’s little bitch. Now that’s something to grieve.

It rolls my stomach and makes me want to look away, but I will not look away.

This is my world now. If I look away this time, I will never live a life of anything but denial or make-believe, and I won’t live that way. I’d rather feel what I am feeling, grieve while I am grieving, even if this grief lasts until my last breath. At least I’ll be alive until that moment.

I grieve for compassion. I grieve for those who are losing their livelihoods, those whose children now worry where their next meal will come from, whether men will come to the door and take Daddy away, who will depend on the generosity of fellow humans, because it won’t be coming from the social safety net. That is being taken apart web by web.

I grieve for the reality of interconnectedness, for standing by allies, for having allies who are the good guys. I grieve for wearing the white hat even if the white hat was only a mirage. I grieve for what my Dad’s generation stood for, went to war for, died for. As a tear falls from my eye, I wonder what he’d think about us becoming what we fought against.

We’re paying our dues, living our karma, caught between many people’s desires to do and be good and the truth of our violent past. We erased the natives of the plains and mountains and called it manifest destiny. We kidnapped and enslaved African people, and in our need and greed, told the story that black people had no souls, weren’t mentally equal to whites, a totally fabricated story that many still believe today. We raped and abused women and said, boys will be boys, worrying more about the damage done to young men than the girls they raped. We used preemptive force on countries instead of self-defense, killing thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of innocents who were simply the collateral of war.

We weren’t the white hats. Never were. We had this powerful piece of paper but never lived up to its promise. We had the opportunity to rise but our greed, our fear of not having, won out. Today I am grieving for the lost potential, for the stories we told, for the possibilities we crushed in our rush for more.

So Today I feel. I feel that loss. I feel the wounds, the damage: a black man sitting on a horse, begging for his life, awaiting that fateful slap when he will be hanging from a tree for not looking down; a woman pushed to the ground, surrounded by three strong men with pants around their knees; a small dark-haired girl, the sound of rockets and no time to run, no place to hide; a Native American out hunting, becoming the hunted, beautiful long hair bloodied and hanging on a saddle; a politician with heart, harpooned with lies, family in shambles; land drenched in oil, seeping into the watershed, poisoning purity for years to come; skies filled with invisible remains of manufacturing glory.

The endless list is bringing life as we’ve known it to a grinding halt. It’s not all bad. They say you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, and we are in the process of finding out what that feels like. Maybe then we’ll make different choices. Maybe we’ll realize that what we do always comes full circle. We can’t duck or hide.

So I grieve. Why? Because it’s what’s appearing today. It’s what’s here right now, not because it is right or wrong, but because it is my reality, and I am unwilling to live a pretend life. I’ve done that and I was more miserable trying to avoid and deny how I felt than I am now, feeling what’s here.

So I grieve.

Amaya Gayle is the author of Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY

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