Kumbaya, Dude. Whatever.
Get 75 percent off your civil rights!
May 4, 2017
Waiting for the subway today, I have the most contentious two minute conversation I’ve had in a while. The guy is older, probably in his early 60s, thick accent of indeterminable origin, with brown skin, and he shakes his head at me when he sees me coming, so I stop to chat.
He says, “You are wrong. He is good man. I trust him.”
I am smiling, but I shake my head. “He lies. He is a liar.”
“This is your opinion.”
“No, this is facts. Three is bigger than two, right? Facts.”
“No, you’re wrong.”
He starts in with, “The criminals from other countries, they can come here…” Dude, the criminals were born here. Criminals are everywhere. They’re in the White House.
I wonder if people standing around think I’m I doing a good job of representing the Resistance. I don’t think I’m smiling any more; I’m angry. I used to be much more gracious to the opposition than I am with him.
I say, “He would tell you, ‘Go back to your country.’ His people think you’re Muslim, and they beat you.”
He shakes his head no and interrupts me the whole time. “This is your opinion.”
True enough. I don’t know how Trump supporters would treat him. I have a suspicion, but this is my opinion. In his opinion, he is better off under Trump, so who am I to disagree? I move on.
A lot of people are feeling hopeless today. A guy in a double parked construction van asks, “Who do you want to impeach?”
“Trump,” I say. “And then Pence, and Ryan, on down the line.”
“When is somebody gonna do something?” he asks. “It’s like, they did so much, and it’s so blatant, why can’t we…”
He cuts himself off, like, why bother finishing a sentence. “We’re fighting,” I say. “We’re going to make our senators fight him. We have to.”
“We HAVE to. This is…this is the worst it’s ever been in my lifetime. The worst.”
“I know.”
“I mean, I didn’t even know how bad it could be.”
I try to sound hopeful. “We’re still fighting.”
Waiting outside the diner where I’m meeting my dad for lunch, checking my phone, the sign resting at my feet. A sixty-ish man with a slight frame pauses his brisk walk. “This is so bad. Why can’t they do anything? Please, they have to do something.”
A guy on the train downtown overhears me singing softly to myself. Between stations, there’s no reason to make extra noise for people, but as we pull in to 42nd, I get deliberately louder as I see who’s filing in.
The man who takes the spot next to me is Fifty-ish Suburbs Guy: LL Beene vest, eau de entitlement, quick disparaging look. So I sing a little louder, just one verse, audible to maybe ten-fifteen people around me.
When I sing, “Kumbaya, there’s a white supremacist in the White House,” I look at the young man across from me and shrug. He nods, and I finish the verse. “Oh, shit, kumbaya.”
The young guy comes over. “That song sticks in your head,” he says. I apologize, but he says, no, he likes the song. He wonders, though, what can we really do?
I can’t even dredge up hope anymore. “Speak out, call your senators, tweet your congresspeople…” I can feel the guy next to me rolling his eyes. “We’re going to get our Senators to get rid of him. And we’ll block everything he does in the meantime.”
LL Beene clears his throat. Again, I wonder if I’m giving the kid the right answer, if I’m doing justice to my ideas.
I lock eyes with the kid. “There’s so many of us,” I tell him. “You are the present and the future. And the old ones are dying off. When we all fight together…”
“We’re powerful,” he says. “Really powerful.”
LL can roll his eyes into the gutter, for all I care. I have the young man’s eye, and he has mine, and we are smiling together. I tell him I have hope. The young man looks like he believes me. For the first time today, and only for a minute, I believe myself.
(To read Kumbaya, Motherfucker in chronological order, click here.)