We Are Not Offering a Way Back
On contempt, the post-Trump moment, and the difference between keeping the peace and building the path.
The Feeling I Didn’t Correct
I saw the headline and felt something I didn’t immediately correct.
Gas prices up sharply — a consequence, the article noted, of the administration’s latest foreign policy gambit. I was sitting in my car in a parking lot, phone in hand, engine running. I scrolled past the economic analysis. What I kept seeing in my mind were the stickers. The Biden stickers people had slapped on gas pumps two years ago, pointing blame with the kind of glee that passes for politics now. I did that, the sticker said. He did this to you.
I let the feeling sit for a moment.
It wasn’t grief for the people now paying more at the pump. It was something closer to satisfaction. They had mocked. Now they were paying. Some part of me thought that was the right order of things.
I know a word for what I was feeling: schadenfreude — pleasure at another’s misfortune. I also know its opposite: freudenfruede — joy at another’s joy. I keep the second one as something close to a life goal. I’m still working on it.
The Verdict I Made Without Words
That moment stayed with me because of what it revealed — not about politics, but about what I’m actually capable of when I think no one is watching.
I have people in my life I love whose political choices I have never understood. People who fed me, who showed up, who prayed over me by name. People who taught me, by example, that character was the whole game. And somewhere in the last several years I stopped engaging. Not loudly. I just went quiet. Managed the relationship at a safe distance. Kept things pleasant and kept the peace and told myself that was wisdom.
Maybe it was. Maybe it was something else.
What I know is this: the quiet wasn’t neutral. It was a kind of verdict. A decision, made without words, that some people were beyond the conversation. That the distance was the right response. That what they needed from me most was my silence.
What Tutu Knew
Desmond Tutu spent years studying what it actually takes for a divided people to move forward. Not theorizing — watching. After apartheid collapsed, South Africa faced a question that had no good answers: what do you do with the people who did the harm?
Tutu’s answer was not amnesia. He was clear about that. You don’t skip past the truth. You don’t call it a misunderstanding and agree not to mention it again. Truth comes first. It has to. Without it, whatever follows isn’t reconciliation — it’s just exhaustion dressed up as peace.
Tutu came to this not as a political strategist but as a Christian. He was an Archbishop. His framework for reconciliation was inseparable from his theology — the belief that no person is beyond redemption, that the image of God is not erased by even the worst choices a person makes. You don’t offer a way back because people deserve it. You offer it because resurrection is what the faith is about — and you have yourself received it.
But after the truth — and this is the part that gets left out — there has to be a way back.
Not because the people who caused harm deserve one. But because a community that offers no path back to the person who has changed, or is changing, or might yet change — that community has decided that punishment is the point. And punishment as the point is not justice. It’s just a different kind of power.
The Door We Keep Refusing to Build
We have never fully done this as a country around race. We have gestured at it. We have made legal adjustments and symbolic declarations. But the truth-first step — the clear-eyed, unflinching accounting of what was done and who bore the cost — we have mostly refused it. That same avoidance — the decision to manage distance rather than build a path — is what I recognize in myself, and what I see us rehearsing again now across a different fault line.
And so the wound has stayed open, available for anyone willing to press on it.
At some point — this year, next year, the year after — the political pendulum will shift. It always does. And when it does, there will be a choice available to everyone who spent the last several years in opposition. The same choice Tutu named. The same choice South Africa faced.
We can greet the shift with contempt. Or we can offer a way back.
Contempt is the easier posture. It has a satisfying internal logic. You did this. You knew, or you should have known. Now live with it. I understand that posture. I felt a version of it watching the gas prices climb.
But contempt doesn’t build anything. It doesn’t move the people who most need to move. It confirms what they already fear — that the other side doesn’t see them as neighbors, just as opponents to defeat. And a person who believes that has no reason to change. They have every reason to fight.
A way back is different. It requires the truth first — yes. It requires acknowledging harm done — yes. But then it has to mean something. It has to be a real door, not a rhetorical gesture. One that ordinary people can actually walk through without being humiliated on the way in.
The Specific People in Front of Us
I don’t think I have fully built that door for the people in my own life.
I’ve kept the peace. I haven’t built the path. Those aren’t the same thing.
Tutu used to say that there is no future without forgiveness. I’ve quoted it. I’ve believed it in the abstract. I’m slower at it up close, with people I know, where the stakes are personal and the wounds are specific and the Biden stickers on the gas pumps still flash across my mind before I can catch myself.
I know people who have posted, publicly, that if you support these policies, the friendship is over. I understand the impulse. I have written versions of that sentence in my own mind, even when I didn’t post them.
But a declaration that certain people are no longer worth the conversation is not a political position. It is a decision about what human beings deserve. And I don’t think contempt has ever changed a single mind or repaired a single country.
What would it cost us to mean what Tutu meant — not as a slogan, but as a practice, with the specific people in front of us?