Day 3,941 —Leaving Today for the Ozarks—

 

Not the long run I had planned, but I did what I could, having to prioritize packing, but first I played video games with my daughter. She told me last night that she really wanted to play a game with me before she went to bed. I promised we would play in the morning, so a little before sunrise we played games together. Afterward, I ran errands, got my car washed, and then I finally was able to go run.

At the car wash, I picked up the local paper and saw that there had been a violent death right by Blackburn Park, where I run every day. If you read the story, one brother kills his other brother. Nothing in the paper gave any indication of what the dispute was about, but it seems like ever since Trump has taken office, there have been so many violent deaths, which shouldn’t be surprising. In 2016, violent crimes went up so much and continue to rise through 2020. There is this feeling of lawlessness among Trump supporters. Last week, a man killed his wife’s female girlfriend over in the Tower Grove Park area. Everyone I know who identifies as part of the LGBQ+ community has told me how afraid they have been feeling for their safety.

         When you have a big population of people with anger problems who own guns, they’re just looking for a reason to use them. They see how Trump can kill, assault, and steal without consequences, so they think why not them too? I hope I am wrong about all of this, and there are still plenty of good people in the conservative party who will not accept that their acquiescence has contributed too, but I don’t know. Some people that I really thought were good, decent people still support Trump and their decision to vote for him. It blows my mind, but maybe it shouldn’t. If there is anything people are good at, it is justifying the bad things we do and responding with, “What about. . . ?”

         They convince themselves that everyone is evil, so it doesn’t matter the difference between someone who is a criminal who wants to dismantle the government and someone who has been a lifelong civil servant and wants to help people. In their minds, these options are the same, but people forget that most Christian churches in Germany sided with the Nazis and actively participated in the removal of Jewish communities. The story my mom let me read about WWII was one where the Christians were the saviors of the Jewish people, not the many great literary works from the perspective of the Jewish people who were at the concentration camps or there in hiding as they lived in fear of being caught and murdered.