As I consider my 70 million cousins who voted to extend the administration of President Trump, I’m struggling to feel our commonalities, our shared humanity, despite our different hopes for our country.
Then I remember the octopus in the Netflix smash-hit documentary, My Octopus Teacher: how strange and beautiful she is, and all the capacities she has to survive.
I’ve made adaptations of my own, to thrive where I live, with those I live among.
For example, I have a second stomach. With it, I can take in things that are difficult to stomach, sit with them, be with them, even eventually digest them, not reject them. It is the stomach I call upon to read US history, such as An Indigenous People’s History of the United States; it’s the stomach I call upon to hear my friend’s stories, like the one about the school counselor who could not fathom a Black student becoming a lawyer; or, when uncovering family history, I learn my Jewish progenitors owned enslaved people in New Orleans, or on the Mayflower-side, benefitted from murder and betrayal of the landholding people already here. My stomach drops with the telling of Kalief Browder’s story, a boy caught and killed by a dysfunctional “justice” system. These are truths of my family and country, and I’m metabolizing them in love for my country and myself. I want to see and know.
I’m not sure my Republican cousins have a second stomach hungry for these truths.
My heart does something strange, too, when I read Jessmyn Ward or listen to Nikole Hannah Jones talk about her father and her uncle; when Kiese Laymon treasures what is unloved by my country and confronts me about it; when Carol Anderson fields talk show calls with might and calm clarity. When it is a Black friend who insists that loving my neighbor demands I love those who vote differently — even those who may call the police if she walks too slowly past their front garden, but not if I do the same — I feel that my heart is burnished, bright, coppery, old and exquisite, and that I can know the best of what humans can be, in the weary insistent light of this grace.
My Republican cousins have also been among this grace, I’m not sure if they know.
I’m of the crashing waves now, fluid like an octopus welcoming the knowing of all of its limbs — really welcoming that knowing, however uncomfortable. I’m not sure my Republican cousins are following a common evolutionary tree. Or perhaps they are also the octopus but in her protective guise, covered in seashells and camouflage. I’m looking forward to hearing of their loves, their lights, without rancor, without rejection, without rejection of me and my loves and my evolution. May we truly see one another.