If Not for Grace, It Could’ve Been Even Worse

Will McCorkle
2 min readJan 20, 2021
Photo by C Drying on Unsplash

The presidency of Donald Trump was a disaster (glad we can write that in the past tense). For many, it was not just bad in a philosophical sense but was an existential threat to their very lives. There are people that will never see their loved ones again because of the refusal and unwillingness to take the virus seriously. There are people who were killed, raped, and kidnapped because of the heartless immigration policies of the president. There will be future ramifications for real lives of four years of doing nothing on climate change and actually regressing. He also planted seeds of the division that will decades to uproot.

Things were very bad. However, if we were to be honest after putting someone in as irresponsible, irrational, and narcissistic into office, things could have been so much worse. As bad as we are in 2021, things are actually better than I thought they would be back in November of 2016. It is but for grace that we did not enter into a massive war after the Twitter tit for tat with North Korea or the illegal assassination of an Iranian general. It was but for grace that only five people died in the raid on the capital and that it did not turn into something much more deadly with widespread conflicts in every American city.

I’m not a Calvinist in believing that God controls everything that is done. I am a big believer in the idea of free will where we even have the option to make foolish decisions like our nation has done with putting in someone like Trump in office. However, I also believe that God is active in the world and sometimes saves us from ourselves. When we look back on this time, we will look back with heartbreak and disgust, but I wonder if we were also will look back in amazement in history that the country did not completely break in two or millions did not die. In some aspects we are hanging on by a string, but it seems like we are hanging on. Let’s learn from our past, and seek to create a better future.

--

--

Will McCorkle

I am an education professor in South Carolina with an emphasis in immigrant rights and peace education