Good People
It’s been so long, I’m not sure where to start.
I’ve had so much loss, I haven’t had much good to offer the world.
I watched my father lose his battle with Parkinson’s, floundered in PTSD from the dementia that made him try to kill me, lost too many friends to count because someone lied behind my back, lost a job and then a church family that refused to be there for me when I needed them the most, and retreated to deconstruct in private.
It’s been years of defeat after defeat. I’ve had a lot to deal with.
But the thing that’s been the worst is watching people I love lose themselves.
To hatred. To spite. To greed.
To every horrible thing that man embodies.
I’ve heard it said a lot lately that they were never good people to begin with.
That’s just not true.
Hatred doesn’t happen overnight, but it hasn’t been a single night. It’s been 10 years.
Ten years of them embracing a lying conman so filled with anger and hatred there is nothing else.
Ten solid years of watching people slurp up every spiteful comment…and become spite itself.
Ten years of becoming more and more hopeless.
They used to be good people.
But they’ve lost all sense of goodness, every ounce of compassion, and we’ve had to watch it happen over a decade. Felt helpless to stop it.
Just when we thought it was as bad as it could get, they sunk to a new low. Every time.
It’s hard enough to grieve one person, one parent. We are grieving whole communities here, droves of people who have no sense of humanity left.
Even the ones who aren’t fully devoted to the person who changed them for the worst now live in selfish ambition.
They used to be good people.
It’s important to remember that.
We have to remember that, not to compromise on the values we hold true to, but to hold onto to some faint and fleeting sense of hope that we can get them back some day.
I’ve been completely hopeless for so long, watching and losing them bit by bit…and now, they’re unrecognizable.
People who used to serve their communities have voted against even their own best interests just to prove how much better they are, to gain some sense of power over everyone they possibly can.
People who used to cheer me on to achieve my dreams are now cheering on concentration camps. They are CACKLING at the thought of children being eaten alive by alligators.
People who CARED…don’t care anymore.
They used to be good people.
We use the word “brainwashed” for a reason. There is no reasoning with them now.
They believe nothing that isn’t on truth social. If it’s on truth social, they believe it.
And nothing else.
Their comments are his…word for hate-fueled word.
They speak nothing else. They believe nothing else. There is only his hatred and bigotry, which has overtaken every good thing in nightmare-ish ways.
It’s like throwing a bouncy ball at a brick wall. It just gets thrown back in your face.
And they’ll be the first to point fingers, to tell us that we’ve been brainwashed by the radical left.
It’s been frustrating. It’s been unbelievable. And now, it’s downright horrifying…that such good people could become - not even shells of who they used to be.
They used to be good people…
I knew in 2020, when they retreated into truth social, that it would be bad…to be so engrained in a place where that hatred and fear-mongering could go unchecked, unchallenged, feeding off itself in the worst ways. Having that certain brand of hatred, bias, spite, sickness firehosed into you every day for years.
We knew it would be bad. I don’t think any of us bargained for just how bad it would be.
Donald Trump would sell you out for a dime - and now they would, too.
Donald Trump would never extend himself to help his fellow human, and now people who have overextended themselves on my behalf plenty of times haven’t given me (or anyone but themselves) a second thought in years.
Donald Trump wouldn’t think twice about stomping his foot in your face to be just that more elevated above you. Now, they don’t hesitate to scream about how others are so far beneath them.
Donald Trump is filled with hatred and rage, and now they are, too.
They did used to be good people.
They lived with compassion and kindness.
They helped everywhere they could.
They inspired me every day to be better.
It seems those people are gone now, replaced by skin walkers who look like the ones we care about, but are so filled with seething hatred it just makes us sick.
It didn’t happen overnight.
It happened bit by agonizing bit, his words washing away every sense of who they used to be to replace that goodness with his personal narcissism and selfish, power-hungry ways.
They used to be good people.
It’s so hard to remember, in the face of what they’ve become.
In the face of what they’re doing, how they’re acting.
In the face of how they believe every single word he says like it’s the only source of truth, their only source of water in the scorching desert.
In the face of how they are tearing our country apart and blaming us.
We need to remember, to keep any semblance of their humanity alive…
They used to be good people.