What Would Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius, and Gandhi Do?

When I became Venture Out Director at Camp Joy in 2000, a challenge was to build our adjunct pool to work with corporate clients such as Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Leadership Cincinnati, and many others. Adjuncts would come to Camp Joy on Saturday mornings to meet and learn how to facilitate and debrief portable and low-ground initiatives and physically challenging high-rope courses.

We began the Saturday morning adjunct gathering, checking in with each other and answering, “Why are you here, and what would you like to get out of today’s meeting?” One Black woman, new to us, answered, “I came out here to meet some good white people!” This woman had experienced the fallout from the April 2001 riots in Cincinnati sparked by the killing of an unarmed Black man, Timothy Thomas, by Cincinnati Police Officer Stephen Roach.

April 7, 2001, Cincinnati Police Officer Stephen Roach fatally shot Thomas while attempting to arrest him for past traffic violations, all non-violent. Thomas was the 15th Black person killed by Cincinnati Police in the previous six years. Cincinnati Police had killed no white person in that same period. Note that Cincinnati had a 40% Black population at the time. Four days of riots lead to millions of dollars in damage. These were some of the worst riots in this country at that time.

This woman has become one of my closest, dearest friends. I refer to her as my soul sister. We Zoom several times a month, and once a year, we co-facilitate a leadership retreat for a significant Cincinnati client with another close friend. We have done diversity, equity, and inclusion work together.

This woman is a mentor and the person most responsible for helping me to learn and understand my white male heterosexual Christian privilege. She has helped me become a better version of myself.

We Zoomed this past Friday morning. She cried. We cried. She is scared of who we are as a nation. She is suffering and is in pain.

This woman’s comment back at Camp Joy in 2003 haunted me then and now.

After this election, I wondered if my definition of decent Americans is skewed, irrelevant, or wishful thinking. Am I naive? I wish I lacked common sense. I wish I didn’t have core values of compassion, justice, and humility. I wish I didn’t hold myself accountable to them and seek people with similar values. I wish I could ignore white supremacy and misogamy. I wish I didn’t care for people experiencing poverty, immigrants, or anyone who doesn’t look like me. I wish I could support the cult leader we just elected. What’s changed since the founding of this country? White Christian heterosexual males rule. Everyone else drools.

I struggle with not supporting the president-elect because I am an American citizen, and he is my president, but because my fellow citizens voted him in, and I can’t turn my back on my country. I am conflicted by my dislike of the president-elect and my desire for American democracy to succeed.

I used to believe I should not let politics get in the way of relationships. Before 2016, both political parties sought the common good. We seemed to be working to understand diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging and were willing to learn about untaught history. We sought to become enlightened. SCOTUS ruled for same-sex marriage in 2015.

That tide is going out.

As I approach elderhood, I fear for America and my grandchildren. I especially fear for my daughter, her wife, and their children. More than ever, for my well-being, I may no longer be able to have a relationship with those who do not share my values, pain and suffering. You who support the president-elect, please recognize the pain I feel for my friends and family from the fear and potential harm coming their way. If you ignore this pain, it will be hard for us to be in a relationship.

*Picture is the “Holy Chaos,” a fresco in the front of the sanctuary at Haywood Street Congregation, Asheville, NC.