The Arise Podcast

Matthias Roberts is a queer psychotherapist (in Washington State) and the author of both "Holy Runaways:

Rediscovering Faith After Being Burned by Religion" and "Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms". He is one of my favorite friends I met in graduate school, a human deeply committed to connection and curiosity, and someone who I deeply admire. With Matthias, I feel a sense of belonging and openness to understanding the world and holding space for that curiosity which is so threatening elsewhere.

Rebecca W. Walston is an African American lawyer, who also holds a MA Counseling, an all around boss babe. Rebecca runs a Law Practice and serves as General Legal Counsel for The Impact Movement, Inc. She is someone who fiercely advocates for others freedom and healing. She is a dear friend and colleague, who anyone would be lucky to spend a dinner with talking about almost anything.

Trigger Warning: Proceed only if you are comfortable with potentially sensitive topics.

This is not psychological advice, service, or prescriptive treatment for anxiety or depression. The content related to descriptions of depression, anxiety, or despair may be upsetting or triggering, but are clearly not exhaustive. If you should feel symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, please seek professional mental health services, or contact (in Kitsap County) Kitsap Mobile Crisis Team at 1-888-910-0416. The line is staffed by professionals who are trained to determine the level of crisis services needed. Depending on the need, this may include dispatching the KMHS Mobile Crisis Outreach Team for emergency assessment.

Speaker 1 (00:18):

Welcome to the Rise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and spirituality. Today we're continuing our conversation on election humanity and politics. I have two guests today. I'm very excited about it. Matthias Roberts, who's a queer psychotherapist in Washington State, and the author of both Holy Runaways and Beyond Shame. Actually, he's one of my favorite friends I met in graduate school. I don't know if he knows that he's a human, deeply committed to connection and curiosity and someone I deeply admire with Matthias. I've always felt this sense of belonging and openness to understanding the world and holding space for that actual curiosity, which has seems so threatening elsewhere. So I want to thank Matthias for joining me and taking time out of his morning. And Rebecca Wheeler Walstead holds an MA in counseling an all around boss babe. Rebecca runs a law practice and serves as general legal counsel for the Impact movement, and she is someone who fiercely advocates for others freedom and healing. She's a dear friend, obviously she's a colleague and she's someone that anybody would be lucky to spend a dinner with talking about almost anything. So thank you, Rebecca, for joining me today.

(01:40):

I can say that for myself in my own experience, my anxiety is heightened overall and feelings that I can keep at bay with regular normal coping mechanisms such as exercise. It takes to me a little bit more and I have to offer myself a lot more grace in the process. I encourage you no matter where you are, to engage these topics with grace towards your own self, towards your neighbor, towards your family, and towards whoever's in your proximity. We won't get things done overnight no matter who we are, and we will get them done if we become more aligned and care more for those in our proximity, that means our neighbor. So if you're feeling or experiencing anxiety around the election or family or other triggers, I want you to encourage you to seek out and find someone to speak with. Maybe you need a mental health professional, maybe you need a spiritual advisor. Maybe it's your coach and it's something related to business. Maybe you need to go see your doctor for aches and pains you've been having. I don't know what it might be for you, but don't hesitate to reach out and get the help you need. We're going to jump into the conversation and voices from across the country. We are all different and we're not meant to be the same. I hope you find pieces of you in each of their stories. Hey, Rebecca. Hey, Matthias. Thanks for being with me today.

Speaker 2 (03:06):

Daniel, thanks for having

Speaker 1 (03:07):

Us. I just thought we would talk about this really amazing subject of politics and humanness because we're so good at it in the United States. Yeah, right. Y'all thoughts on that? Even as I say that, just politics and being human, what comes to mind?

Speaker 2 (03:34):

For me, there's almost a dual process happening. I think about my first thought was, well, politics are, but then I also thought about how when we separate institutions out from people, especially in the way that corporations tend to separate out how they become anti-human so quickly, and not that politics is necessarily a corporation, but I think there's a form of it. There's something corporate about it. And so I think about that juxtaposition and maybe the dichotomy there between, yeah, it's human, but I think it's also anti-human in the ways that it has to, I think almost by definition, separate from maybe these places of deep feeling or nuance in order to collapse all of that experience into something that people can rally on.

Speaker 3 (04:51):

I think there's something dehumanizing about our current politics, but I think that that is about power. I think when politics becomes about the consolidation of power or the perpetuation of power or the hanging on to it sort of desperately, then it no longer is about the people that the institutions and the country was built to serve and protect. And so I think there are all these ideals in our politics that on paper and in theory sound amazing, but when people in their humanness or maybe in the worst of our humanness step away from other people and not just people as sort of this collective generalized, but the actual person in front of you, the actual person in front of you and the story that they have and the life that they live, and how decisions and theories and ideals will impact the actual person in front of you. And when politics becomes about collecting power and maintaining that power at all costs, then it's no longer about people. It's no longer about lives. It's no longer about stories, and all those things become expendable in the name of the consolidation and the maintenance of power. And I think that at its heart is a human question. It's a question of selfishness and self-serving and maybe even self idolatry.

Speaker 1 (06:49):

I think that I agree, Matthias, I've been thinking a lot about, because in my family it's been a lot of comments like, well, we shouldn't talk about politics because we're family. I'm like, wait a minute, wait just a minute. Because the very politic that is being said from one angle is hurting the humanity of this other particular family member. How do we make sense of that? How do we say politics isn't a very human, the impact is meant to impact humans. The power is meant to impact humans, so the political sphere has become so toxic to us.

Speaker 3 (07:40):

Yeah, I think that sentence, we shouldn't talk about politics because we're family. It says more about maybe our fragility as a culture in this moment and our inability to have hard conversations without feeling like the difficulty of them fractures, relationships and familial bonds in ways that cannot be repaired or restored in any way. And I think it is also a statement about the toxicity of our politics that we have allowed it to get to a place where it actually threatens those kinds of familial bonds in some sense, you want go back to, you remember that book that was big in the nineties? All I ever learned about life I learned in kindergarten, right? All I ever needed to know, it reminds me of that because raising kids, I would raise my kids to say, there isn't anything on this earth that should fracture your bond as siblings. I raised them to believe that. I insisted that they engage the world from this vantage point that come hell or high water do or die is you and your sister. That's it. And it doesn't matter what happens in this world, there should never be a scenario in which that isn't true. And we have arrived at this place where people honestly believe that your political affiliation somehow threatens that.

(09:19):

That's sad and sad feels like a word that's not heavy enough to articulate. There's something wrong, really wrong if that's where we are,

Speaker 2 (09:35):

I think it speaks perhaps to our inability to do conflict well, and I'm the first, I don't do this all with my family at all. I'm terrible at conflict with my family, at least in the arena of politics. But I think about, I wonder if some of the fracturing that we say, I don't think it's all of it by any means, but is that reality of, because we can't have these conversations in our immediate family, it's getting projected into the wider, I mean, it has to play out somewhat. It is going to, that's the nature of it. So because we can't do it locally, it is having to play out on this grand scale. Rebecca, as you said, sad. I think it's horrifying too.

Speaker 1 (10:44):

It's what?

Speaker 2 (10:45):

Horrifying.

Speaker 1 (10:46):

Yes. It's very dangerous to be honest.

Speaker 2 (10:54):

It's very, yeah, those bonds, we have the familial bonds. Those are protective in some ways when we remove that, we remove those protections.

Speaker 1 (11:11):

I think we've been practicing at a society, and I'm talking particularly about the United States at ways of removing those bonds in multiple spheres of the way we've thought about life, the way we think about another person, the way we judge each other, the way we vote in past elections. I mean, the civil rights movement is pushing against that notion that family means dehumanizing someone else. And so even this idea of, I'm not even sure if I can say it right, but just how we've constructed the idea of family and what do our shared values mean. In some sense, it's been constructed on this false notion that someone is worth more than another person. Now, when that person shows up as fully human, then I think we don't know what to do with it.

Speaker 3 (12:11):

Yeah. I think something you said, Mathias about we don't do conflict well, right? I think rarely is any issue, black and white. Rarely is any issue. So clear cut and so definitive that you can boldly stand on one side or the other and stay there in perpetuity without ever having to wrestle or grapple with some complexity, some nuance. And I think maybe part of what we don't do well is that right? Somehow we've gotten to this space where we have maybe an oversimplified if that, I'm not even sure that's a good word, perspective on a number of issues as if there isn't any complexity and there isn't any nuance and there isn't any reason to pause and wonder if context or timing would change the way we think about something, right? And nor do we think that somehow changing your mind is no longer acceptable.

(13:20):

I think about, I saw a number of interviews with Kamala Harris. People talk to her about, well, why'd you change your mind about this or that? Why'd you change your perspective about this or that? And then part of the conversation was about when did we get to this place where growing and learning and changing your mind is bad for someone who is in the profession of holding public office since when can you not get in public office, learn some things differently, meet some new people, understand the issue better, and go, you know what? I need to change the way I think about this, but we are there. All of a sudden it means you're not fit for office, at least as it has been applied to Kamala Harris in this particular and even before her. The notion of a flip flopper is again to say you can't somehow change your mind.

Speaker 2 (14:21):

So that makes me start to then think about some of the myths, and I mean that deeper theological myth in the sense of not that it is untrue, but more in the sense of how it permeates culture. That's when I say myth and we have this idea or many people have this idea of a God that doesn't change, a God who doesn't change his mind as the ideal of there is right there is wrong, and the ideal is no change. And we have examples and scriptures, at least I believe, of a God who does change his mind, who sees what happens and change is what he does. And I think those can be compatible with maybe some ideas that maybe God doesn't change, but we also have examples of God changing his mind. But I think that has permeated our world of something unchanging is better than someone who or something who does change. And I wonder what that impact has been

Speaker 3 (15:38):

That made me pause. I certainly come out of a faith background of hold to God's unchanging hand. I mean, I can come up off the top of my head with a dozen different examples of the notion of he does not shift, he does not change. And the kind of comfort or solidity that can be found in this notion that we're not subject to the whim of his mood in any given time, but what you said causes me to think about it and to think about what does it mean to say that we live in a world where there is a God who can be persuaded by something in the human context that will cause him to respond or react differently than perhaps his original mindset is. I'm going to walk away from this conversation pondering that for a while. I think,

Speaker 2 (16:30):

Yeah, there are stories of that in scripture.

Speaker 3 (16:36):

The one that comes to my mind is the story of, and I'm not going to get all the names correct, so whoever's listening, forgive me for that. But the story that comes to my mind is the prophet of old who is pleaded with God for more time on earth, for more space to be alive and walk the earth as a human being. And God granted his request. And again, now there's a bit of a paradigm shift for me. What does it mean to say that I live in a world where there's a God who can be persuaded? I think the other thing when you said about a God who changes his mind, what comes up for me is also a God who holds extremely well the nuance and the complexity of our humanness and all that that means. And so often I find it's sort of the pharmaceutical attitude that we can have that things are rigid and there's only one way to see it and one way to do it. And if you ever watch Jesus's engagement with the Pharisees, it's always actually the problem is more complex than that. Actually the question you're asking is more than that. And so what matters less is the rule. What matters more is the impact of that rule. And if we need to change the rule in order for the appropriate impact, then let's do that.

Speaker 1 (18:08):

It's kind of gets back to something I've been learning in consultation, talking about this idea. I think we're talking about very young spaces collectively for our society. If I was to put it in that frame, the idea of as a child, a very young kid, even into your teenagers, you need to know something solid. You need to know that's not changing. That's the rule. That's what I got to do. And it's the parent's responsibility to make meaning and metabolize nuance for you and help you process through that. But one of our first developmental things is to split. This is good, this is bad, this person is safe, this person. That's a developmental process. But in somewhere we got stuck,

Speaker 3 (18:54):

It brings to my mind, you've heard me reference raising kids. And so I raised my kids to say this idea that you have to be respectful and thoughtful in your choices. And I always told my kid that so long as you are respectful and thoughtful in your choices, your voices will always be heard and welcomed kind of in our home. And so my daughter approached me, she's making an argument about something that I absolutely did not agree with her final conclusion. I was like, there's no version of anybody's universe where you're doing that, right? And she says to me, but you said if I was thoughtful and I was respectful that I could assert my position and I have been respectful in my tone and I've been thoughtful in my position. And she was absolutely right. Both had been true, and I found myself having to say, okay, now I sort of backed myself into a corner.

(19:58):

She followed me into it and the conversation ended up being about, Hey, that's true. Those are the parameters, but you're older now and the things that you're making decisions about have more impact and they're more nuanced and complex than that. So we need to add a couple more things to your rubric, and it's a hard conversation to have, but it makes me think about that developmental piece that you're saying, Danielle, that when we're younger, there's certain sort of bright line rules and the older you get and the more complex life gets, the more you need to be able to actually blur those lines a little bit and fudge them a little bit and sometimes color outside of the lines because it is the right thing to do.

Speaker 2 (20:48):

I think that movement from that really kind of rigid split into Rebecca what you're talking about, it requires that grappling with grief and loss, it requires that sense of even if I followed the rules, I didn't get what I wanted. And that is we have options there. We can rage against it and go back into the split, you are bad. I'm good, or actually grapple with that. I did everything I was supposed to and it still didn't work out in that words, it doesn't feel good and grieve and feel the pain of that and actually work with those parts of ourselves. And there is so much that our nation has not grieved, not repented from, and we are in the consequences of that.

Speaker 1 (21:53):

I was just thinking that Mathias, it's like we're asking one another to make meaning, but we're at a very base level of meaning making. We're trying to first discern, discern what is reality, and a lot of times we don't share reality, but when you're a baby, the reality is your caregiver hopefully, or even the absence of you become accustomed to that. And so I think we've become accustomed to this sense of almost this indoctrination of a certain type of religion, which I would call white evangelical Christianity, where they're telling you, I can make sense of all of this from the perspective of race. I can do that for you. Whether they talk about it explicitly or not, they're like, I can tell you what's good and bad from this perspective, but then if you add in how do you make sense of all the Christians vote for Trump and 84% of African-Americans are going to vote for Kamala Harris. I grew up thinking, are those people not Christians? I didn't know as a kid, I was raised with my father. I didn't understand, didn't make sense to me, but I thought, how could so many people as a child, I actually had this thought, how could so many people not know Jesus, but go to church and how could all these people know Jesus and say they're going to heaven? It never made sense to me.

Speaker 3 (23:19):

I mean, what you're saying, Danielle, is probably why there is a very clear historical and present day distinction between white evangelism and the black church. That's why those two things exist in different spaces because even from the very beginning, white evangelicalism or what became white evangelicalism advocated for slavery, and Frederick Douglass learned how to read by reading the scripture at risk to his own life and to the white slave owner who taught him how to read. And once he learned to read and absorbed the scriptures for himself, his comment is there is no greater dichotomy than the Christianity of this world and the Christianity of scripture. And so your sense that it doesn't make any sense is as old as the first enslaved African who knew how to understand the God of the Bible for him or herself and started to say out loud, we got problems, Houston.

Speaker 1 (24:39):

Yeah, I remember that as a young child asking that question because it just never made sense to me. And obviously I understand now, but as a kid you grow up with a certain particular family, a Mexican mom, a white father. I didn't know how to make sense of that.

Speaker 3 (25:04):

I mean, you say, oh, even now I understand and I want to go. You do. I don't explain that to me. I mean, there's a certain sense in which I think we're all in many ways, and I say all the country as a whole church, the American church as a whole trying to make sense of what is that, what was that and what do we do now that the modern sort of white evangelical movement is essentially the Christianity of our entire generation. And so now that that's being called into question in a way that suggests that perhaps it is white and it's religious, but it might not in fact be the Christianity of the Bible. Now what do we do? And I've spent some time in recent years with you, Danielle, in some Native American spaces in the presence of theologians who reckoned with things of God from a Native American perspective.

(26:09):

And if nothing else, I have learned there's a whole bunch. I don't know about what it means to walk with the God of the Bible and that my native brothers and sisters know some things I don't know, and I am kind of mad about it. I'm kind of angry actually about what it is they know that was kept from me that I was taught to dismiss because the author of those ideas didn't look like the white Jesus whose picture was in my Bible or on the vacation Bible school curriculum or whatever. I'm sort of angry at the wisdom they hold for what it means to be a follower of what I think in many native spaces they would refer to as creator, and that was withheld from me. That would've changed the way, enhanced the way I understand this place of faith. And something that white evangel and evangelicalism expressly said was heresy was of the devil was to be ignored or dismissed or dismantled or buried.

Speaker 1 (27:31):

I mean, you have Tucker Carlson referring to Trump as daddy in a recent speech. So you then have this figure that can say, Hey, little kids, don't worry. Your worldview is okay. It's still right and let me make sense of it. I can make sense of it for you with X, Y, Z policies with racist rhetoric and banter. I can do anything I want. I can show up in Madison Square Garden and replicate this horrific political rally and I can do it and everybody will be okay with it, even if they're not okay, they're not going to stop me. So we still have a meaning maker out there. I mean, he is not making my meaning, but he's making meaning. For a lot of folks.

Speaker 3 (28:29):

It is even worse than that. There's a couple of documentaries that are out now. One's called Bad Faith, the other one's called God and Country, and in one of them, I think it was Bad Faith, and they're talking about the rise of Christian nationalism. For me, as a person of faith, one of my biggest questions has always been, there's nothing about this man's rhetoric that remotely reflects anything I ever learned in every Sunday school class and every vacation Bible school, in every Bible study and every church service I've ever been to. He is boldly antithetical to all of it.

(29:06):

And he says that out loud, right back to his comments about, no, I've never asked God for forgiveness because I've never done anything that warranted forgiveness that is antithetical to the heart of evangelical Christianity that asserts that the only way to God and to heaven in the afterlife is through the person of Jesus Christ. And so every person has to admit their own sin and then accept Christ as the atonement for that sin. And he bluntly says, I don't do that. Right. So my question has always been, I don't get it right. Two plus two is now four in your world. So how are 80% of evangelicals or higher voting for this man? And in that movie, bad faith, they talk about, they make reference to the tradition of Old Testament scripture of a king who is not a follower of God, who God sort of uses anyway towards the bent of his own will.

(30:18):

And there's probably a number of references in Old Testament scripture if I was an Old Testament theologian, some of the people who have invested in me, I could give you names and places and dates. I can't do that. But there is a tradition of that sort of space being held and the notion what's being taught in some of these churches on Sundays and on Wednesday night Bible study is that's who he is. That's who Trump is in a religious framework. And so he gets a pass and permission to be as outlandish and as provocative and as mean spirited and as dare I say, evil or bad as he wants to be. And there is no accountability for him in this life, or the next one, which I don't even know what to say to that, except it's the genius move to gaslight an entire generation of Christians that will probably take hold and be with us for far longer than Trump is on the political landscape.

Speaker 2 (31:29):

I am not fully convinced it's gaslighting. On one hand it is. They're saying one thing, doing another. It absolutely is by definition. And I think growing up in white evangelicalism, there is, at least for the men, I think an implicit belief, I don't even think it's explicit. It's becoming explicit that they get that past too. It functions on those passes, those senses of we don't have to hold up to accountability. And I think we see that in all the sexual abuse scandals. We see that in the narcissism of so many white evangelical pastors. There is this sense of, as long as we're in this system, there isn't accountability. And so you can say one thing and do another, and it doesn't matter. You have God's authority over you and therefore it's okay. And so I think there's something, I'm right there with you, it doesn't make any sense, but I think it's also quite consistent with the way that authority has been structured within those

Speaker 1 (33:14):

Spaces that you said that I felt like, I don't know if you ever get your heartbeat right in your neck, but I had it right there. Oh, yeah. I think that feels true. Yeah, it's gaslighting, but also it's meant to be that way.

Speaker 3 (33:39):

Do you think that that's new math or is that at the inception? What do you attribute the origin of that? And I don't disagree with you, I'm just sitting here like, damn, okay, so where does that come from and how long has it been there?

Speaker 2 (34:04):

I don't know. I have guesses. I think, how do you enslave an entire people without something like that and then found literal denominations that are structured on these power and authority? It goes back to what you were saying at the beginning, Rebecca, it's about power and accountability supports power.

Speaker 3 (34:50):

Yeah. Have you read The Color of Compromise?

Speaker 2 (34:59):

There's a documentary by that same name, right? The film

Speaker 3 (35:02):

There might be

Speaker 2 (35:05):

See the film. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:07):

So he makes a comment in the book. He is writing this chapter about sort of the origins of the country and the country is as the colonies are being formed before it is a country, the colonists are in this sort of public debate about slavery and Christianity. And at least in tissie's research, there's sort of this group of colonists who come to the United States or what will become the US for the sake of proselytizing, evangelizing who they term savage, native and then enslaved Africans. And they're having this public conversation about does the conversion of a native or an African to Christianity remove them from slavery, essentially? Can you theologically own someone who's a profess child of God?

(36:32):

And Tse says that the origin of that debate has to do with an old English law that said that you can't enslave someone who is of the faith. And I remember reading that and thinking to myself, there's something wrong with the logic that you think you have the right to own any human being regardless of their faith belief system or not. There's something wrong with the premise in general that you believe as another human being, you have the right to own or exercise dominion over another human soul. So those are the things that go across my mind as I listen to you talk and propose the notion that this issue has been there, this flaw in the thinking has been there from the beginning.

Speaker 1 (37:40):

I was just thinking, I am reading this book by Paola Ramos about defectors and how Latinos in the US have moved to the far right, and she makes a case that the faith of the Spaniards told them that in order to achieve superiority, they should basically make babies with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. And they went about and did that. And then I know we always think popular literature, the United States, oh, India has this caste system. That's what people say, but really Latin America has a really complex caste system too. And to which after they brought over, and Rebecca and I know Matthias, you guys know this, but after they brought over stole African human bodies, a majority of them came Latin America, what we know as Latin America, they didn't come here to the United States to the continental us. And so then you have this alliance then between, and I'll bring it back to politics between these mixed Spaniards with indigenous folks also in enslaving Africans.

(38:56):

So then you get to our political commentary and you're recruiting Latinos then to join the Evangelical white church movement. And they've often been demonized and excluded in spaces because of citizenship, which adds its own complexity where African-Americans, now they have citizenship right now on the current day, but then you have these Latinos that it can be born or they're brought over on daca. So then you have this complexity where not only is there this historical century hating of African-Americans and black folks in Latino culture, but you also have this sense of that to get ahead, you have to align with white folks to come against African-Americans. You have all of that in the mix, and also then you also have to deny yourself and the fact that you have African heritage and indigenous heritage, so it's this huge mind fuck, right? How do you make sense of that colonial jargon in the political landscape? And then how does a Latino think, how do they actually encounter the nuance of their humanity and all of that, but complexly set up by the Spanish who said, we're going to enslave this X people group. In the meantime, we'll just mix our mix with this certain race, but the white people will be more dominant. And so you see that all comes into the United States politic and who gets to be human and who gets not to be human.

Speaker 3 (40:44):

I mean, in some ways, Daniel, you're pointing out that, and I think this goes back to math's point of several minutes ago, none of this is new under the sun. All of this is just current day manifestations or reenactments of a racialized dynamic that's been in play since forever, since even before maybe even the American colonies, right? Because what happened in terms of the transatlantic slave trade in Latin America predates some of that.

Speaker 2 (41:18):

Yeah. I mean, I think about England colonizing a huge portion of the world under the name of their faith that requires quite a distancing from accountability in humanity. Then you get an extreme fringe of those folks starting their own colonies.

Speaker 3 (41:47):

I mean, it does make me think, and my Pentecostalism is about the show, but it does make me think that there's something about this whole dynamic that's starting to feel really ancient and very old patterns that have been in place, and to me suggests from a spiritual standpoint, an enemy that is organized and intentional, and I have begun to wonder less than a week out from the election, what's the game plan if the election doesn't go the way I hope it does? What happens if America decides to give into its lesser urges as it has done in the past, and choose a path that is contrary and antithetical to its ideals what we're going to do? I ask that not even from a practical standpoint as much as spiritually speaking, how am I going to breathe and how am I going to make meaning of what you do with a world where that's the reality? We were talking before we got on air about the rally in Times Square and we can rail against it all we want, but there was hundreds of thousands of people there saying, yeah, let's do that.

Speaker 4 (43:40):

That scares me. And

Speaker 2 (43:52):

It doesn't go away. Even if Harris wins, I think your question of what do we do if Trump wins? It's a sobering question. It's a terrifying question, but I think it's also a very similar question of even if she wins, what do we do? What do we do? These people don't magically disappear.

Speaker 1 (44:30):

We're going to have to do no matter what. I just feel like there has to be some sort of, like you said, Mathias, just processing of the grief of our past because it's chasing us. You can hear it in each of our stories. It is just chasing us what we've been a part of, what we've been asked to give up. And I think America, well, the United States, not America, but the United States is terrified of what it would mean if it had to face that kind of grief.

Speaker 3 (45:23):

I don't know about that, Danielle, because for there to be terror would mean that you have had some conscious admission that something is gravely wrong. And I'm not even sure if we're there yet. I think America as a whole has a whole lot of defense mechanisms and coping mechanisms in place, so they never even have to get that far. And I don't know what you call that, what comes before the terror, right? Because terror would mean some part of you has admitted something, and I just don't know if we're there. And that's just me meandering through a thought process. But

Speaker 1 (46:19):

Oh, that's scary too, right? I think you're probably right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think we're going to bump up against our time. I know, Mathias, you have something coming up too, but any final thoughts? I don't expect us to solve anything or wrap it up, but

Speaker 2 (46:47):

I'm just noting how I'm feeling and there's something both sobering and grounding about this conversation. I don't think we've covered really any kind of necessarily new territory, but to continue to speak these things, it's so brain, but it's also like, okay, we can ground ourselves in these things though. These things are true and it's terrible, but when we ground ourselves, we have ground just, and that feels different from some of the up in the air anxiety I was feeling before coming to this coverage, just the general anxiety of the election that is so pervasive. So that's a shift.

Speaker 3 (47:53):

I think I found myself looking back a lot in recent days back to the history of the story of African hyphen Americans in the United States, back to some fundamental things that I learned about my faith early on. And I have a sense of needing to return to those things as part of grounding that regardless of what happens in the next week or the next several months or even the next six months, we have been here before as a country, as a people, and we have survived it, and we will do so again. If I think about the black national anthem, God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, and I have found myself needing to return to those traditions and those truths, and I think I'll stay there for as long as my mind and my body and my emotions will allow me to as a way of breathing through the next several days. I mean, talk to me on November 6th. That might be in a very different place, or January 6th or January 20th, but for today, I find myself looking back, I have some curiosity for each of you. What are those traditions for you, in your own spaces, in your family, in your culture, in your people? What are the things that have grounded you in the past, and can they ground you again going forward?

Speaker 2 (49:43):

I'm sitting here finding myself wanting to come up with some beautiful answer. And the reality is I don't know that I have a beautiful answer. It's a difficult task.

Speaker 1 (50:00):

Yeah. I mean, no, we're wrapping up. I can't give you anything clever except I think what comes to mind is I often just tell myself just the next hour, the next day, sometimes I don't even think about tomorrow. I tell myself, don't rush too much. You don't know what's in tomorrow. Today's going to be okay. So I kind of coach myself up like stay in the moment.

Speaker 3 (50:38):

And in all fairness, Danielle, your people, if you will, are facing a very different kind of threat under a Trump presidency than mine are, and that is, I'm firmly of the belief if he's going to come for one of us, eventually he will come for all of us. But I'm also very aware that the most pressing existential threat is coming against people of Latinx descent people who very well may be American citizens, are facing the potential reality that won't matter. And so your sense of blackness gay through the next hour, I'm good. I have a lot of respect for what these days are requiring of you. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (51:43):

Thanks for hopping on here with me, guys.

Speaker 2 (51:47):

Thank you.

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.