Waiting for Justice
Send the Rain, Please

ELIZABETH GEORGE
May 16, 2026

My favorite poem is by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was a Jesuit priest in Victorian England. It’s called “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord,” and I’ll share it with you.

“Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend/ With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just/ Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must/ Disappointment all I endeavor end?// Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend/ How would thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost/ Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust/ Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, /Sir, life upon thy cause. See banks and brakes/ Now leaved how thick! Laced they are again/ With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes/ Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,/ Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes./ Mine, O thou Lord of life, send my roots rain.”

I read this poem when I was nineteen years old. It struck me to the quick then, and it does the same now. Indeed, it seems that never have the words of the poem been so applicable and so poignant as they are in this moment, in America. It’s as if Gerard Manley Hopkins is speaking to us from his Dublin grave, expressing the same questioning confusion that so many of us feel as we watch Donald Trump display open contempt for the Constitution, the nation’s honor, the nation’s traditions, and the laws that apply to all American citizens, even to him. We are witnesses to the ways in which he has violated his oath of office which had him declare—hand on a Bible—that he would preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. We have seen the many ways that he has prospered from the good will and devotion—misplaced though it may be—of his supporters, who have purchased golden phones, watches, sneakers, Bibles, guitars, fragrances, coins, medallions, hats, shirts, hoodies, flags, and mugs. We see the many ways in which he has prospered through gifts, business partnerships, and licensing deals with foreign governments such as those in Qatar, Saudia Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and China. He has, with complete impunity, enriched himself while allowing his children to enrich themselves, while allowing his wife to enrich herself, while all the time abnegating all responsibilty for the health and welfare of the people he once swore to serve. And the endeavors of those very people remain both unacknowledged and unrewarded as they bear the burdens he has callously placed upon their shoulders: the burden of healthcare, the burden of mortgage payments, the burden of rising costs and inadequate wages.

Somehow, he manages to thrive despite the “sots and thralls of lust” that he feels no shame in openly displaying. We see his lust for power in his treatment of his underlings who dare not raise a voice against him for fear of punishment, disregard, humiliation, and dismissal. We see his lust for historical significance in his renaming of buildings to ensure “Trump” is part of what is mounted or engraved upon them. We see his lust for glory and adulation in his gold-drenched surroundings, his proposed monuments, and his golden statues of himself. All the while, no one points out to him how ugly are these outward manifestations not only of his character but also of his soul.

I often ask myself how on earth, as a nation, we ended up here. But it never takes an enormous expenditure of my time to come up with an answer. All bills come due. All invoices must eventually be paid. Trump is the living embodiment of the absolute worst of what America has tried to keep hidden or has left unacknowledged or has airily explained away. And, if you are even a marginally educated American, you know exactly what these things are: everything from the horrors of genocide to the unrepentant pedophilia still present among the powerful. We’ve given all of our most hideous sins an innocuous nomenclature: our participation in a Middle East genocide becomes “a war against terrorism”; our attempts to overthrow governments becomes “regime change”; kidnapping becomes “extraction”; torture becomes “enhanced interrogation”; dropping bombs on people in boats becomes our “war against drugs.” We stoutly give names to our incursions into foreign countries when those incursions cannot be hidden from the public. We sanitize with names like Operation Desert Storm (Kuwait 1991), Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq 2003), Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan post 9/11), Operation Just Cause (Panama 1989), Operation Urgent Fury (Grenada 1983), Operation Rolling Thunder (Vietnam, sustained bombing campaign) and now Operation Epic Fury (Iran). These names gift legitimacy to whatever our government employs the military to do in its name. But the government acts in our names as well.

Those among us with consciences make attempts to halt the gangrenous decay within the body politic. We write letters, we make phone calls, we show up at meetings, we hang protest banners from our houses and from freeway overpasses, we post lawn signs decrying the President and his political party, we show up at rallies, and we march. Even though we are exhausted by everything happening in the country and the speed with which it is happening, we know that giving up is not an option. We are daily bombarded and overwhelmed with recitations and documentations of a single man’s grip upon the reins of a horse he spurred into action but cannot control. That horse is now tearing not for a cliff but for an abyss from which we cannot hope to extricate ourselves should the horse take that leap into the void that it appears determined to take. We can stop that horse. We must do everything in our power to stop that horse. Trump cannot do it; his cabinet and the GOP Congress will not do it; the nation’s billionaires do not wish to do it. It is down to us, and so we must do it: first with our outrage and then with our votes.

© 2026 Elizabeth George
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104