Born on Good Friday

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

I was born on Good Friday. I wasn’t raised religious, but I’ve always understood the cultural significance of that date and worn it like a birthmark. My life began on a day when the Christian world was celebrating the ultimate act of love, kindness and sacrifice. I have always believed in those ideals.

This week, I woke up on my 25th birthday to the overwhelming realization I’ve been staving off since high school — that the kindness, understanding and acceptance that I hold dear has been the instrument of our own destruction.

Every week, I watch government meetings, spend hours following national, state and local politics, and see how small-minded, pathetic narcissists have weaponized the ideal of “live and let live,” using it as a vulnerability to grasp power and wealth. These politicians and plutocrats have learned that our doctrine of acceptance has given them carte blanche to stomp on the rest of the world’s autonomy.

These people have no love, they have no joy, they have no kindness, and they have nothing but fear and hatred and the desire to distract from their own inadequacies by dominating anyone with less power than themselves. All that was good in them suffocated under the weight of their egos long, long ago, yet we have let their putrescence fester because we believe everyone should live how they want to live.

There comes a point when being kind to one group is inherently cruel to another. Our duty to respect one another’s beliefs ends when those beliefs threaten someone else’s existence. We have been sedentary for too long, and now our friends, loved ones and neighbors are under threat.

It was just Easter, and even on one of Christianity’s most important holidays, men like Donald Trump and JD Vance throw around the name “Jesus” and use others’ good intentions to play God and hand down commandments to the masses they deem inferior. I guarantee that most people who have never been Christian a day in their lives are still better Christians than these fascist terrorists.

Trump and his bootlickers croon about having “God’s favor” like 15th-century Medicis, all the while steering humanity toward war, poverty and global catastrophe. I’ve read the Bible. If you see Christ’s likeness in Trump, you need to admit your so-called faith is a hollow ploy to control others.

“Jesus loves Trump.” Yes, Jesus loves Trump the way he loved the Romans as they executed him and the way he loved the money changers as he braided a whip with which to beat them. Jesus’ message was one of love and repentance, but these deranged oligarchs will never repent. Their goals are to seize power, revise history and call into question anything previously held to be true.

I am so consumed by rage and hate it makes me scream and cry and pull my hair. My body can’t contain the emotion. My whole life, I’ve lived under the threat of school shootings, watched the spread of preventable diseases among my peers and heard bigots celebrated on every street corner. I have watched the world degrade for 25 years because of the actions of a selfish few, and I know that compassion will not win the day.

Kindness is something to fight for, but we still have to fight.

These people will continue to infiltrate every level of government — every school board, health district and central committee — until they burn the world to the ground for the thrill of it. If you were fooled — if you voted for these people — I forgive you, but you have to help fix what you broke. Everyone who exclaims with glee that they will take away education, health care, food and clean water is not someone we can afford to tolerate any longer. We must pity them and recognize their humanity, but we must also strip them of their power, of their wealth and of their influence, just as they have done to everyone else.

Resist, protest, vote and organize while we still can. When the time comes, be ready for a fight the likes of which we haven’t seen since the ’40s. Even Jesus understood there was a time to turn the other cheek and a time to flip tables.