I want to start this open letter to people who have been vaccinated by apologizing. As much as keep preaching that “the fight” is not between the near totality of humanity who have been marginalized by a few who bleed all of us irrespective of our identity or ideology, at times my actions don’t meet the standards I ask others to follow. Too often, I have let my passions override my compassion as I let the unkind words of a close one or a stranger lead me into the gutter of vindictiveness.
After 18 months of unbearable duress, being pitted against one another by the establishment and the hopelessness that comes with this seemingly never-ending pandemic, nerves are frayed on all sides. In a time that calls for unity and kindness, too many keep letting our emotions get the best of us as we hurl insults and seek the comforts of groupthink. I have tried my hardest to do the opposite as I wrote one article after another about the imperative of leading with love instead of being led by anger. But when someone reverts to ad hominem, my moral compass points due south to wrath as I pay back anger with animus.
I am praying daily to loosen the virus of vengeance from my heart; I have yet to fully heal from being otherized when I was a child and teased mercilessly for being a foreigner in a new land. As a person of faith and someone who has witnessed first-hand—after enduring nearly two years of homelessness—how broken people revel in trying to break others, I should know better than to react with fire when what this world needs the most is the water of grace. Yet, as Aeschylus once noted, “wisdom is earned through pain that falls drop by drop upon our hearts” until we learn at long-last it is impossible to do better if we are stuck in the grips of bitterness.
As much as I am trying to do better when it comes to not reacting to the vitriol of others who are hurting, I have zero regrets about castigating the globalist elites who weaponize their wealth and leverage their influence to purvey suffering and hopelessness throughout the world. Like Robert F. Kennedy once said in his speech A Tiny Ripple of Hope, “there is discrimination in this world and slavery and starvation” and those iniquities are not the attributes of our neighbors, countrymen and global citizens but the works of a depraved oligarchy who are intent on setting the planet on fire in order to remake the world in their image.
