Shifting Political Winds
The introduction of Trump turned out to be more dangerous than I thought possible
Walking through my faith deconstruction/reconstruction journey has required a lot of vulnerability. That is why there is a paywall below. If you want to support my writing but do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation. I will give you one month of access to all paid content.
The previous chapter
And now
I opened my phone after having it turned off for the last 48 hours. I immediately began seeing the news threads pop up on Facebook. Various versions of “Trump issues Muslim ban” repeatedly came across my news feed.
I caught my coworker’s attention once I was sure none of the students on the bus would be able to hear me. “Uma, he did it. He passed the travel ban.”
“Here we go,” was all he could muster in response.
We had just spent the previous 48 hours chaperoning a group of students from our school’s Christian Social Action class as they participated in a poverty simulation in Waco, Texas. While we were learning along with our students, the ground shook under the country. An immigrant himself, Uma had been openly apprehensive with me about the incoming administration, sharing concerns that he could not openly share with most of our very conservative colleagues. He had survived civil war in his home of Sri Lanka and the first place he found refuge, Sierra Leone. He knew what it was to need a safe country to land, a place where he could get a fresh start and make a new life for himself.
I thought about my upcoming unit in Pre-AP English 10. In the next week, I would start teaching Elie Wiesel’s haunting memoir, Night. I had taught Holocaust studies in varying degrees since my first year of teaching, and had read Wiesel’s short work numerous times. I had been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and visited Dachau when I was a college student studying abroad. I had spent years studying the Holocaust, determined to help my students learn how to prevent similar humanitarian disasters around the globe. Now that it appeared a similar disaster was unfolding in my own country, I felt helpless. What was I supposed to do about this in my own very conservative corner of the world?
When Donald Trump came down that golden escalator in June 2015, my husband Jeff and I were in the middle of busy preparation to get our house sold, find a new home in Houston, and start a new life in a new state 1000 miles away from our families. I watched the footage of the announcement with mild curiosity, convinced it would be over before it began. After all, there were several traditional, tested, and reasonably competent Republican contenders vying for the nomination. No one could possibly take him seriously.
We moved from conservative northeast Indiana to conservative North Harris County, Texas, where we knew that our moderate political viewpoints would continue to keep us in the minority in our work and church circles. But I had also started teaching at a Lutheran school that seemed to embrace being the hands and feet of Jesus. My previous school had made a valient effort to encourage service and community Bible study; my new school had students consistently leading weekly chapel worship, theology classes that actively taught them how serve others by putting their Christian faith into action, and female theology teacher who was encouraged to speak during chapel. (This was a welcome change in a denomination that repeatedly argued against women preaching in any context.) I knew we had not moved into a less conservative space, but between our new church’s active Bible study culture that didn’t appear to shy away from difficult conversations and my new school’s apparent openness to challenging the synodical status quo, I was encouraged in my belief that there was no way Donald Trump would gain enough support for the presidential nomination.
