Will Election Night Be Peaceful?

Wrath of the king’s men

I own a little house in an inner city neighborhood. I bought in the area because I wanted to contribute to change and show people you don’t have to abandon the neighborhoods we grew up in to live a good life. It’s pretty quiet. There are a few small churches in the subdivision, one right across the street from my house.

A couple of days ago, one of my neighbors, a slender, handsome old man with mostly gray hair, who I would guess is probably in his mid-seventies, asked if I thought the presidential election night will be peaceful for minorities, especially Blacks and Latinos. That was a good question. I don’t know the answer, but I hope that it will be. History tells us that it will be. Tradition tells us that it will be peaceful, but this is no traditional president, and the nature of his following is not what history or tradition reflects. So we hope.

The people of my neighborhood are mostly black, then Hispanic, with a few whites. It’s working class; a lot of my neighbors work at a plant or teach in teach in the city’s public schools. We’re trying to get the city to do something about littering in the area, and hourly motels, but we are all proud of the new building for the high school down the street.

We are concerned. We see stories about the president not being sure if he will leave office peacefully if he loses. Of course I know that legally, he has no choice, but revolutions are always against the law. And we also know that you don’t have to successfully overthrow a government to kill a father walking home from a bus stop or kill a kid going to the store for candy and a drink.

One morning I went to a sporting goods store, and I overheard two of the employees saying that the store had sold out of every gun in stock the night before. They’d never seen that happen before. I wonder if I was a fool for not being among them.

“Ain’t gonna be no kids hanging from trees around here or no churches burning either,” my neighbor says. His jaw is set.

We know what the president has said. We remember that after a white nationalist, James Alex Fields Jr, ran his car into a crowd of protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing protester Heather Heyer, the president said there were some “very fine people on both sides.” We remember the Trump supporter who sent sixteen pipe bombs to political opponents of the president’s, including Former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, along with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, frequent Trump critic, the actor Robert De Niro and offices of CNN.

These things are not imagined, and we know the people who carried out these attacks are not alone in their beliefs, just as Dylan Roof is not alone. They are part of a movement. These people feel an allegiance to President Trump. There are those who would fight for him. There are those who would die for him, or for the idea of who they think he is. They are all the king’s men.

Some people are saying we should sit out in our garages on election night, just in case. The whole neighborhood on guard. We don’t know what will happen if Trump loses, but no one believes his supporters will simply accept defeat. It seems they believe Trump is something more than a president, more than a man. I’ve seen people say they think he was sent by God.

I wonder about the path we walked to get here, to this strange America we now live in. Were ours ever actually, united states, or have my fellow Americans begrudged me every single breath I ever took as a free man?

I hear some families are planning to keep their kids home on election day even if the schools are back open. My next door neighbor says he is sitting out. I will probably sit with him. I couldn’t wake up Wednesday morning and find out that something happened to him. I couldn’t wake up Wednesday morning to find out that everybody was there for the community, but me.

In the absence of a large wooden cross, burn a church instead.

I have counted six churches in our small subdivision. A lady on the next street says we need to make sure to protect the churches since white supremacists have a long history of burning black churches. The message sent by a burned church, she says is: Even God cannot protect you. I am not religious at all, but I will help. It takes a village.

Never in my life have I had to wonder if someone will shoot up my house or burn a neighborhood church because of election results, and I’d really like to say these neighbors are just being paranoid, but in the America of today, in our nation made great again, voting could once again be listed as the cause of death. Waking up Wednesday morning is in question.

Some neighbors are outraged by stories of gun shop owners refusing to sell to black customers. I have seen a video of a gun shop owner asking a black customer to tell him why he wants a gun before he would sell to him. Not being a big gun person, I wasn’t too pissed about it, but I understand.

And I don’t understand. Will we call the police if we see something? The church lady says we shouldn’t count on them coming, not that night. She thinks we should be prepared to put out the flames of a burning church ourselves. We may be on our own that night.

Our nation has become venomous, feeding on the flesh of her children. We will watch the churches and the cars. We will be on the lookout for people looking to vandalize a building or paint something racist on a garage door. We hope the sun will shine again that Wednesday morning in November, that there will be a return to decency. We hope the David Dukes and the Steve Bannons of the world will crawl back into their caves. We hope that being a racist will be a deal breaker again.