Fear and Powerlessness in the Shadow of Trump

Among the urban core of San Antonio, the idea of a Trump presidency usually provokes one of two responses. The first is ridicule. It’s great fun to poke at Trump’s cartoonishly hyperbolic litany, but as I sat watching the presidential debate at Burleson yard last week, the crowd seated among benches and picnic tables struck me as indistinguishable from a similar group watching videos of kitten antics. The gaggles of young men “bro-ing out” over their common disdain and couples tittering into each other’s ears preceded time enough to critically analyze the individual arguments presented by the orange one.

Green Grass

If you spend your life trying to cut every blade, you’ll have wasted it doing the exact opposite of what we were put on this earth to do: grow.
As you lay in you bed, counting your remaining breaths, the single most terrible thought could be that the whole time, grass was growing, and after your chance is up it’ll still be growing. Are you any taller now than when you started cutting?
Do you still believe in God, father? Rather, do you still believe that he put you on earth to cut grass everyday? Surely he didn’t, for every species we are unique to are capable of that task. Such a mad god he’d be, to give us faculties of such magnitude and wish for us to mimic the ants and grasshoppers in life, and dream of an endless nap after it. Surely any but a mad god would want us to bring more than just a bag of sweat, humility and a bucket full of holes used to empty out the sea upon our backs into those gates.
This God-given awareness was meant to perceive the grass, the ants, the stars and the wind, and decide on the best use of itself.