Dwayne Ackley Stories

When I registered to vote at the age of eighteen I registered as an independent. My first vote was two years later voting for Larry Forgy, a Republican for Governor of Kentucky and Bill Clinton, a Democrat for President. At that time in my life I was full of conspiracy theories about the assassinations of Martin Luther King, RFK, and JFK and wanted to believe that the mainstream media was lying about everything in order to control me and everyone else in the country.

The real problem was me. I had grown to hate the conservative evangelical world that I had grown up in and wanted to prove that I knew something that everyone else didn’t even if it wasn’t true. When I decided to get married I felt completely rejected by my family and specific members of the church family I grew up in who made sure I knew that they didn’t think my marriage would last.

Eventually… after a lot of faithful searching, reading endless amounts of books about history, and a lot of healing I rejected the conspiracy theories I believed in and healed in my seething animosity toward conservative politics and the Baptist Church.

I was never really sure about Trump. I watched the first season of the Apprentice thinking he was massively entertaining. I also watched an interview he did at the time with Barbara Walters where he bragged that he wasn’t the type of father that would go in the yard and throw a ball with his kid. I came away from that convinced he was more wrapped up in personal gain than fatherhood.

I recently started going to church again and it has slowly become a bigger part of my life year by year.

I’ve gone through periods in my life since where I’ve been upset with both sides of the political spectrum for their lies or their sycophantic lockstep with a particular candidate or idea.

We are on this earth to love one another.

Society will not function for all when there is a wholesale rejection of the other side as evil particularly when it is said that one side’s faith and/or beliefs are evil.

It took me 18 years to heal from all the hatred and anger I was holding inside which was exactly the amount of time it took me to put those things in place.

It will take a very long time to heal from the painful divide we are all feeling today.

Even today less than 24 hours later one side is pushing conspiracy theories in order to push a narrative that deflects blame for yesterday’s insurrection despite the fact that we all saw the rally that started it.

I believe the current divide in this country started with the massively close and bitterly divided election of John F Kennedy which was almost exactly 60 years ago. There are still history books written to this day about stolen elections or how the world would have ended if the other side had won.

Our country will heal from this.

Hopefully it doesn’t take as long as it did to put this hatred in place.