WAITING FOR A TABLE to celebrate a good doctor’s visit, we traveled back in time this afternoon in the lobby of an old favorite restaurant in Charlotte.
By RAHN ADAMS
MORGANTON, N.C. (May 28, 2025) — Since May 2017, my sweetheart and I have spent considerable time at Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte—our stays thankfully less extended and less frequent as the years have passed. We were there today for what has become an annual visit for tests and consultations. We are truly thankful.
At the start of this journey, Timberley had to endure multiple scans and painfully relentless blood testing and radical surgery that would have made even the patient Job cuss. This morning, however, she had three quick and relatively painless tests done. Later she met again briefly with the surgeon who had saved her life eight years ago. Though inconvenient, today’s trip back to the huge medical center was a tolerable and not entirely unpleasant reunion of sorts.
My job all along has been to provide support services for our shared endeavor—driving us from Boone or Morganton to Charlotte, often in the predawn hours; sitting patiently in waiting rooms while appointments are met, usually masked to keep from catching others’ viruses (which has happened, anyway); and driving us back home through summer heat, winter cold, and any type of traffic, without cursing the transportation gods (the auto pilot?) too often or too loudly.
Admittedly, I’ve had the easier job. I hope I haven’t fallen short of expectations—or at least not too much.
As I completed my assigned tasks today, I was reminded of just how fragile we human beings are, whatever our gender, whatever our race and ethnicity, whatever our religion, social class, or age, even. Surely, we all need some sort of help, whether we sit and wait maskless with a red cap on our bald heads, or masked with a hijab covering our long, dark hair (all of us with heads down, our attention transfixed by our smartphones). And all of us will need help again, sooner or later.
But here’s the rub of the green—a phrase you might recognize from the golf course, or not: We all need help, but some of us can get only as much help as we can afford, and access to that assistance is evaporating thanks in large part to one or two prominent men in our government and to their supporters. You know who I mean.
If you support Donald J. Trump and his Christian Nationalist agenda (basically Project 2025), and if you also support Robert Effing Kennedy Jr. and his bizarre approach to healthcare, I want to say this as plainly as I can in terms you can understand:
You’re going straight to hell along with your MAGA messiah and his ass-kissing apostles.
No matter what your preacher says, Donald Trump is a liar, conman, fraudster, adjudicated rapist, convicted felon, insurrectionist, incompetent and demented president—and those are his good points—but first and foremost, he is a lying sack of shit. I refuse to put lipstick—or any other kind of fake hair and makeup—on that pig, just because he scammed his way into the Oval Office, again.
And like so many sons of purportedly great men (Billy Graham and son Franklin come to mind), the junior Kennedy is a cheap imitation of his senior namesake, unworthy of the elder man’s legacy.
So, unless you’re a billionaire (unlike so many rank and file members of the MAGA cult), you’re a fool for believing anything Trump and Kennedy Jr. say, and for foisting your misguided beliefs, religious or not, on anyone else. Maybe you’re just a greedy bastard and don’t give a crap about Matthew 6:24, or you’ve simply forgotten how Trump’s bungling of the pandemic killed thousands more of us than might have otherwise died. Maybe you just don’t care.
I must admit, though, that thanks in large part to Trumpism’s popularity over the past ten years, I no longer believe people actually go to hell for misbehavior—no, not to a literal lake of fire and brimstone. So, my apologies for putting it that way earlier. But I no longer believe there’s a Christian heaven, either, where mansions await us along streets of gold, or where harp-strumming angel bands play hymns or even classic rock around the clock.
We make our own heavens and our own hells here on Earth, whether for ourselves or for others.
Frankly, I wish Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr. would spend more time in the hellish places inhabited by saints that I’ve visited over the past eight years, and less time in the wealthy paradises full of shameless whores (of both genders) that they’ve created for themselves.
Instead of spending so many millions of our tax dollars playing golf every weekend, the Donald should take his buddy Bobby Jr. to Levine Cancer Institute or any place like it, and spend some quality time with the fine folks there—you know, like other athletes and celebrities have been known to do.
They—or you, in their place—could sit there with me or with someone like me, and wait and watch and worry and wonder if help will still be there when we need it.
Then I might believe something that you, as one of their disciples, or they have to say.
Lord. Very powerful!