letter to a young man who didn't understand
why I woke up crying the first time trump was elected
The Unitarian Universalist Church of St. Petersburg / St. Pete, FL // April 6, 2025 (2 days after the death of my father)
Dear Young Man I Dated in 2016,
I have something very important to say to you, and it isn’t ‘I told you so.’
It is this:
Politics are about people and the planet.
Every single political issue is about people, or the planet.
Politics do not equal some ideological, intangible thing. “Politics” are real things with real consequences to real people. Probably people that you know. Probably people that you love.
When you say, “I’m not political,” what I hear is, “I do not actually care about people other than (a handful of) the ones I know personally.”
Politics are about people, or the planet.
And if they are about the planet then they are about every single person on it.
So politics are about people and the planet.
Where is the disconnect?
How can you, as a straight, white, cisgendered man from modest amounts of money, not care about other people who are not the same that you are, and how this thing called Politics impacts their lives and their livelihoods? How can you be so myopic? How can you call people “Brother” and not care? How can you call yourself a Christian, and not care? I have never understood this. I have wondered it many days in the past 9 years.
The morning we woke up and Trump was president for the first time, I woke up crying in Brooklyn.
You were my boyfriend. You were younger than me. You were living on Long Island. You didn’t understand.
“I don’t think it would be that different if Hillary were President,” you said.
“The President really doesn’t have that much power,” you said.
“The elections that really matter are the local ones,” you said.
Young man.
You aren’t that young anymore, so.
Are you paying attention?
Young man who didn’t understand why I was crying.
Young man who had seemingly never seen the film “Idiocracy.”
Young man who thought I was being “too political.”
Do you see now?
Do you care now?
Art by David Feldman, from the Gulfport Little Free Art Library / Art in the Yard // 2931 DuPont St. S /// March 2025
Has funding been pulled from something you care about?
Have they come after someone *you* love, yet?
Do you love any woman, in danger of her right to vote?
Do you love anyone on the autism spectrum, who is at this very moment being profiled?
Do you love anyone of color?
Do you love anyone with a different gender expression than you?
Do you love the arts?
Do you love children from low-income households, who need to eat at school?
Do you love little ones getting a decent public school education? Being taught science? Given the intellectual tools to make up their own minds about things?
I sincerely hope you use all that 12-step compassion you told me you gained, to see things very, very clearly.
Politics are about people.
And people, in our country, and abroad, are under siege.
Wake up.
Look at the most vulnerable among us.
Pay attention.
Join us.
Resist.
Big Love,
Lila
A jacket 10 years in the making / Crafting is good for grieving // Gulfport, FL /// April 2025
P.S. My frenister (friend + minister) Ben Atherton-Zemen wrote this: To the person who told me you hear "nothing but politics" from me at the pulpit, I wanted to share my friend Rev. Andy Oliver's remarks. I am not a Christian, but I still share his perspective, especially this:
"We are living in a moment where ICE is engaged in racial and ethnic cleansing without due process. Where the Health Secretary is calling for an autism registry. Where trans people are being denied basic health care. These are not abstract issues—they are spiritual emergencies. And to ignore them, especially from the pulpit, is how churches throughout history have become tools of white nationalism—from the silence of Jim Crow to the complicity of the church in the Holocaust."