I had a thought this morning that is gnawing at me. It came to me shortly after I learned that this Supreme Court has basically gutted the Voting Rights Act, setting up this tyrannical racist administration to further destroy Democracy.

Shortly after I read about SCOTUS’s ruling, I thought about something a wise woman said to me after church on Sunday. (Yes, I go to church. Just not the Franklin Graham kind of MAGA church.) We were standing in the church courtyard when she leaned into me and whispered that she resents that she has to spend what are supposed to be the “Golden Years” dealing with Trump. To be honest, James Comey isn’t the only one writing 86-47. Most everyone I know longs for the day Satan comes to claim his homeboy. As I often say, I pray for Trump, too, just not the same way as Paula White.

I told my church friend I completely understand. That’s why I keep leaving the US. It helps center me. Usually, I point to all the ways that the UK has survived bad rulers and failed policy makers. Most recently Tim and I have had late night discussions about the Troubles in Ireland. We, like a lot of people, have been watching Say Nothing series on Hulu. I read the book on a recommendation from an Irish friend and now am in the middle of the series. Tim and I are headed to Belfast in a few weeks and this is just part of that preparation.

After a particularly brutal scene the other day, I stopped the show and said to Tim: “I was in high school. I remember watching the bombing in Belfast. It wasn’t really that long ago.”

It is inconceivable sometimes to imagine how easily violence erupts. One day you are headed to a market or to meet friends for lunch and the next thing you know your leg has been blown off and your friend or your child is laying bloodied and dead next to you. One day you are teaching a 3rd grade class and Pete Hegseth orders a missle strike on your school. Somehow you survive the first strike, along with a dozen of your students, so you hurridely round those crying kids up, and run them to another part of the school to pray and hide. Only no God intervenes and you along with all of your students are blown to kingdom come with the missle that strikes forty minutes later.

Or you’ve joined with your friends at a corner downtown to protest against the high gas prices and grocery gouging only to be shot graveyard dead by some random guy pretending the mask he’s wearing makes him the Lone Ranger.

All that thinking made me sit up straight when I realized that when I turn 70 later this year I will have spent nearly a third of America’s 250 years living in utter chaos. I grew up in Georgia during the Civil Rights era. I lived through the non-fiction version of the assassinations of Medgar Evers, JFK, MLK, Malcom X, Bobby Kennedy, John Lennon, etc. I have witnessed as political parties led us into wars that were wrong from the get-go, wars they lied about, wars that cost men like my father their lives, and whole bunch of others their health – Vietnam, Israeli War, Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Middle East wars, and a host of other so called “incursions”. In reality the list of the wars we’ve either engineered or participated in is way longer, and so is the death toil on both sides. War is good business as those who invest in bombs knows. In America, war is the quickest way for the rich to get richer. Have you even paid attention to how old Shitfaced Trump and his creepy buddies are cashing in?

I’ve lived through Columbine and Parkland, Sandy Hook and Thurston High. I’ve been writing about school shooters for so long I’ve run out of breath. Come to find out all this time, I should have been writing about the need for a gaudy ballroom.

The children I met when their fathers were killed in George W. Bush’s manufactured war are grown now, college graduates, working jobs of their own, some of them are even serving in Trump’s manufactured war. And yet, Americans still don’t have the universal healthcare that Hillary Clinton worked so hard for, and Republicans still hate her for it. I’ve come to think Republicans, at least a certain coven of them, hate anyone who works to actually help voters.

I’ve lived through the fight for women’s rights, worker’s rights, human rights, environmental justice, reproductive rights, the right to vote, and now I’ve lived long enough to see the latter stripped away from people of color by a bunch of bad actors pretending they are impartial SCOTUS, and if MAGA gets their way women will also lose our right to vote.

I lived through 9-11 and now three fictional attempted assassinations of America’s Most Hated President.

I could, of course, go on and on. If you’re 60 and older you get it. If you are in your 80s or 90s, you’ve seen even more chaos out of this country than me.

I’ve lived long enough, traveled to enough places to know the fallacies behind the myth that America is the greatest country in the world is a propaganda tool used best to compel boys and girls to give their lives for policy-makers manufactured wars, the way my own father did.

I was a few months shy of my 9th birthday in 1965 when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, gutting the Jim Crow laws of the South designed to prohibit Black men and women from voting. I was a few months shy of my 10th birthday when we received word that my beloved father had bled to death in a country where he should never have been ordered to go.

And now, here I sit, 60 years on, half-a-year shy of my 70th birthday when the John Roberts court, in a completely partisan SCOTUS vote, gutted the Voting Rights Act. Ensuring that the White Nationalist movement that is destroying whatever is good about this flawed nation of ours will spread like a death plague, stripping Blacks and other marginalized populations of their Constitutional Rights.

All in the name of their MAGA-made Almighty – Donald J. Trump.

I’m tired, y’all. Worn plumb out. But by gawd I am not done fighting. I will work harder. I will continue to call my legislators. You should too: 202-224-3121.

MAGA Republicans want us to give up. Don’t.

They want us to think we’ve lost. We haven’t.

What they don’t understand is they ain’t seen nothing yet.

VOTE. And fight for the rights of others to do so.

Karen Spears Zacharias is author of After the Flag has been Folded (HarperCollins).