Resist – Susan X Jane

Coffee and Collapse

These last few months we have seen enormous erosion in the stability of our democracy as we descend into a roiling pit of racism and division ahead of the true start of the 2020 presidential campaign. I bought a coffee maker! This isn’t the first time I have used a little retail therapy to soothe emotional distress—you know how it goes, bad day, buy a cupcake, rough work news? New shoes. For the current constitutional crisis, I thought a coffee pot would be just the ticket.

I must admit, for a while, I just stopped watching the unfolding of our contemporary apocalypse. My eyes hurt, my brain hurt, and most of all, my heart was broken each day. Unlike the news cycle that washes itself clean with the next big story, I was unable to forget the horrors of yesterday, last week, last year. Kids in cages, killer cops, deregulation, tax breaks for the wealthy, racist attacks, white nationalism. When reporting moves on, these situations continue to explode like strings of landmines left behind. Years after the Black Lives Matter movement’s moment has ceased to command top news status, cops that killed citizens are exonerated and justice is denied for the families and communities that have fought the respectable way through a justice system stacked against them. Boom. Gone are the riots in the streets and the mask-wearing protesters, gone the swing of national attention and concern. Buried under the fold, at the bottom of the hour, a few sentences, a few seconds about the exonerated taking a badge again, a second of dog-eared sympathy barely mustering a sigh before launching into celebrity news—Beyonce in Lion King—amazing!

News wasn’t just depressing to watch, it felt like a daily push down a slippery slope. I felt less informed when I watched, felt like I was being spoon-fed just the hot sauce, just the frosting—the hot takes, shady snaps, and sweet endings that drive the most click-worthy content. Sure Trump is the master of distraction, but the opinion panels assembled to opine hours a day feed on the distraction even in their outrage. Like clockwork, Trump tweets outrageous bullshit Saturday evening, setting up the red herring all the Sunday shows will chase. The week is spent tweeting and subtweeting both on twitter and around the water cooler. We all compete for the hottest take, the sweetest rebuttal, and the most coveted prize of all—the best meme.

So time for a new morning ritual, one removed from the problems of the day. My coffee maker is small: I enjoy drinking coffee, but more than two or three cups a day has my heart racing like a racist Trump tweet. I figure I can save the environment by cutting back on styrofoam Dunk’s cups and straws. I pull a huge bag of beans out of the cabinet—super cheap due to the collapsing coffee market: what a bargain! Plus the ritual of grinding and making the coffee is a more soothing way to start the day than the latest headline about the crisis at the border. I have a small coffee grinder. It drowns out the sound of a Morning Joe segment on record heat waves. The coffee only takes a moment to brew, one Round-Up weed killer ad, one for pickup trucks. Coffee’s ready! Environment saved, I click on the a/c and hit my writing room.

I have a hard time writing about our current state of affairs without lapsing into hyperbole or tottering into fiction. I doubt my own understanding of what is happening on any given day. We’ve slid so far into the simulacrum that reality is not only relative but sometimes not even relevant. Multiple civil rights movements compete for headline space while the patriarchal white supremacy propaganda machine pumps out another generations’ worth of ignorance. Lost in the fog of our information war are the glacial gears grinding us all—capitalism, environmental collapse, technological determinism and a religious adherence to me-over-you on a tiny rock where it’s going to be all of us or none of us.

There is no neutral these days, though. Choosing sides is easy—drop into a social media circle where an algorithm feeds you only the kind of information you like. Not choosing is choosing too, to look away from what America is just now waking up to (again) is to sing its favorite lullaby. In every generation of America’s short life, black and brown people have battled to be free to live the American creed of equality and justice for all, and in every generation, the powerful machine of white supremacy that manufactured America has refused to produce a more equitable country. I am only the latest in a long line of people for whom this battle has always been, for whom it is always personal. So no there is no choosing, and no losing myself in endless self-care at the expense of my own responsibility to be informed.

I spend cup one pouring over the latest on the reparations debate. Some can barely understand why we should care about a debt so old and potentially overwhelming—in a country where millions are drowning in their own debt, the failure to flicker an eyebrow at life long debt seems not so out of pocket. Besides, how can we enjoy our best life if we’re always attending to the crushing debt we ignore like so many melting ice caps? Besides, no slave owner still lives. Though corporations—who of course are people per Citizen’s United, and in our hearts where our [brand] loyalty lies—that benefited from slavery can and do live on, fueled by the blood money of millions kidnapped and killed in the fields of early American capitalism. Banking and insurance industries, shipping and trade found their foundations of success in trading humans. Some of those companies still exist, their books intact with the transactions that sold people like so many cattle plainly marked in fading ink. While individuals slave owners may be dead their capital lives one; trade of people created pools of generational wealth still tapped into today.

I like my coffee sweet, so today I, too, enjoy my legacy from the slave trade. Sugar, like another early staple cotton, fueled a boom so big it built the richest nation in the history of the world. On the one hand, it seems ludicrous that a product as prolific as sugar would be the basis of so insidious a trade, and yet it was because this trade was so prolific that sugar is the sweeter that sits on every countertop. Four hundred years ago only the rich could afford what was an exotic sweetener newly arrived on the tables of Europe. Now sugar is in practically every edible product but salt. Perhaps it is fitting then that America struggles with an obesity epidemic as we keep feeding on the fruit of our most toxic tree.

Cup two and it’s on to news of massive ICE arrests just days after a domestic terrorist targeted Latinos first in his manifesto using words borrowed from a Trump stump speech and later with bullets in a Walmart as parents and kids shopped for bulletproof backpacks and crayons for back-to-school. Crying children are left homeless and parentless, registering a weak tick on the sympathy chart. Kids in cages, kids shot by police, kids molested, kids shot in school. Showing sympathy for kids being crushed by the systems we adults create and execute is becoming a full-time job. Better to turn the page, perhaps another cup. Good coffee, grown in Guatemala. The picture on the package shows green mountains—with no sign of the struggle so many are seeking asylum from—must be lovely this time of year!

Cup three is always a push, leaves me feeling a bit jumpy—too aware of all that I need to ignore to get through a workday. But it tastes so good I drain the cup, feeling myself tilt like a patron on a sinking ship. Is it the coffee or is the world tilting? At the back of my mind the strains of nearer my god to thee sound a titanic tune for going down. From my precarious perch on the edge of cup three, I can see too much. I watch a week of mass shooting coverage like I am reading tarot cards.

I notice the newscasters’ eyes shine where the breaking news is hot and fresh. Wolf Blitzer appeared suited and booted in CNN’s headquarters in under an hour of the El Paso shooting, claiming the news desk from the second-string Saturday anchor to get that juicy coverage airtime. Twenty-four hours after the El Paso shooting, bodies still lay in the aisles of Walmart but we had already moved past them to take up familiar positions: gun control, mental health, Trump, Trump, Trump.

There is a breathless excitement at the traumas of the day. There is little information beyond soundbites—many newsrooms were long ago gutted by cutbacks and media consolidation. Each news story is a sip of bitter and sweet, hits of content like a drip of a drug where the high has long been replaced by addiction to the ride itself—shock and horror, followed by thoughts and prayers topped with a dose of the viral good vibe of the day to keep you coming back. Delicious! A little sugar has always sweetened this country’s bitterest chapters.

We are too busy turning our crumbling world into killer content to think clearly about what is happening. We are deconstructing reality to build the inter-webs of our fantasies with nary a glance at what we are becoming. There are too many likes to be had to do the boring grunt work in, say, door-knocking or book-reading, or critical thinking. I see the crisis clearly—headlines and think pieces abound for you to see too, in case you haven’t heard of our imminent collapse. And yet I feel deeply the chasm between the world we are narrating and the world we live in. Like you, I wring my hands and wonder what can we do; I try not to focus too much on Trump, on the individual slights…but I like my steak in the matrix, too.

Even as I write these words I sip on the seeds that planted all this catastrophe. My coffee and sugar, my SUV and my lawn care, my a/c and my social media rants—my life is not separate from the systems that are wreaking havoc on our nation. It is easy to focus on where the news cycle tells us to, but harder to acknowledge the ways the fabric of our own life is used to build the world. It’s not just the leader of the legislature it is all the ways that we structure power. The world created by those structures gave rise to what we see now. It is in our daily rituals, our common habits, snaking throughout our whole culture.

One day if all continues, Trump won’t be president, and we will still be America, addicted to consumption and clinging to our sacred individuality. No tweet-able position will right this ship, only a return, a rethinking, and rebuilding can make us seaworthy enough to travel towards our better stars. Beyond the clickbait is a longer and more difficult conversation about who were are to become that we need to have. We don’t have to wait for things to get better—or worse, more likely—before we begin in our own sphere of influence, wherever that is, to build a new world

Let’s practice every day. Let’s talk outside of talking points. Let’s think and read and learn beyond the story of the day. You have a responsibility to be informed about the world you live in and the impact your choices can have in that world. You can do that with the same internet connection that brings you our beloved memes. You can do that today, wherever you are, and talk about what you learn with whoever you see.

Let’s think about what really matters—and live our lives that way. Just because our country is out of whack that’s no excuse to throw your own code to the wind. Make connections between your own behavior and the systems we seek to change. Act in ways that align with your beliefs. Do what you are good at—knit for resistance or bike to end hunger—to encourage others to do the same

Let’s get real about the problems of our nation and let’s bear careful witnesses to the daily injustices so that we may stop them. Let’s call a thing a thing and stop letting the propaganda machine redefine what it means to be free. Stop checking out and show up. Talk, donate, act, join, walk, shelter, feed, and manufacture with your words and deeds a reality that we might live in a world that is more than a house of cards against the wind.

I’m off the sugar. I’m paying attention. I am writing this to me as much as to you. This is a daily practice. This is a grueling workout. Yes, it will wear you out but I’m here to tell you that you—yes, you— are alive at this moment for this very purpose.

If you read this far, you are a champ! Thank you! -sxj

When They Tell You Who They Are

The looming approval of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination comes barely a week after he raged and yelled and cried in front of a Senate committee, half of whom were drawing hearts with “B.K.” and their initials in it when his accuser Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford presented her case. The FBI, who has enough resources find all the lost socks in the world, presented the findings of an investigation where neither accuser nor many others interested in offering information were interviewed. For a representative government, this seems like a good time to ask who they really represent.

Maya Angelou said, “When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.” That is good advice in another week when ~~women~~ ~~some women~~ people who care about sexual assault victims are pleading to be heard and have their experience recognized. Kavanaugh supporters have spent the last weeks dragging out every reason to minimize, dismiss and silence sexual assault victims. Thousands of victims shared raw powerful stories of their own experiences to try to help senators and their supporters understand.

Stop. Stop sharing your feelings and your deepest pain with the people who care more about power than people. Stop trying to help those whose spirits are set on sleeping, illiterate in their own humanity. No carefully crafted explanation you give will make them change their beliefs. They are not seeking to understand. They do not want your help. They want to be insulated by their hate and ignorance. More than anything, they want to rule the world, at any cost. They demand to keep living in their nostalgic America–the America of Big Dan’s and sexual abuse in the back rooms of churches, days when a woman who wanted a voice just needed to be reminded of her place.

While it is true and important that the #MeToo movement has brought important conversations about rape culture to a wider audience, the senators who will vote to support Blackout Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination are uninterested in cultural transformation. The question raised by an enraged constituency–would you confirm a bellicose liar (31 lies and counting) who also is a potential sex offender–is answered with a simple yea. The end game for them is power, a court that will lean conservative for years to come.

Kavanaugh’s confirmation won’t take years to pay off, though. While lots of people are thinking the rush is on to beat the midterms, there is another, bigger fish on the line. The Supreme Court will hear a case on double jeopardy that has potentially massive consequences for Trump and the Mueller investigation according to the Congressional Research Service:

The Gamble case may nevertheless have significant collateral legal effects … A win for Gamble could also indirectly strengthen the President’s pardon power, by precluding a state from prosecuting an already-pardoned defendant who has gone to trial on an overlapping offense.

And there it is: save the supreme court nominee, save Trump’s world. Looks like Trump and Kavanaugh have more than sexual assault allegations in common. Their conservative leaning on this case have them in la-la-love and rushing to get to the spicy part where Trump helps tank the FBI investigation and Kavanaugh ensures Trump’s pardon powers.

In these days of change, we rightfully resist. We demand that previously marginalized voices be heard. We work to create space for new ways of being that foreground compassion, humanity, and empathy. We think we can appeal to the humanity in others–if we just say the right thing, show them our wounds, beg them to remember we are family they will finally see the light and usher in utopia with us. We all want the same thing: to be safe, to be free, to have a healthy family that can thrive, and the resources we need in the pursuit of happiness.

But we have a blind spot. We forget that there are people who are wholly willing to kill for safety, to enslave others to create their own freedom. There are people invested in keeping the narrow definition of family in order to center their traditions. There are whole systems set up to funnel resources from the many to the few. This is not a drill–this is really who they are and no amount of tragic personal narrative will stop them from working against everything we believe in. We can’t reason with them; we can only remove them.

The Black Lives Matter movement has gone through these growing pains. While many massive peaceful protests did focus attention and grow the movement it was only the beginning. After Trayvone Martin’s killer walked free, and video after video showed cops kill people with no subsequent consequences, after die-ins and marches and the occupation of Ferguson, there was no come to Jesus moment when America suddenly recognized the humanity of black people and called for widespread change. You can’t win systemic transformation by appealing to people who are invested financially and ideologically in your oppression.

The tactics of the BLM movement didn’t stop at protests alone. Our liberation was never going to be born the love child of white supremacy and our demands for justice. Instead of begging our oppressors, we are building ourselves. In fact, there is a solid case to make that we are in the midst of an unprecedented black renaissance. Our activists are moving from the streets to the halls of power, becoming elected officials with the ability to make change Our artists are creating a vision of the new world in film and TV, illuminating our path. Millions of black people are doing what they can with what they have where they are: starting businesses, growing community, getting educated. Most importantly, black people are talking to each other, working to create unity and help our sleeping brothers and sisters wake up. This is how we get free.

Whatever the result of Kavanaugh’s nomination, the past few weeks have shown us who the right is. Conservative men AND women have dismissed sexual assault as just a teenage rite of passage or a privilege of prep school boys who later rule the world. They do not care about women’s equality. They do not care about holding men accountable. They will not change their mind even when they find your case compelling.

It’s time to stop begging and keep building. Lingering on your anger over Kavanaugh will not help. Instead, take stock of what you can do and do it. Vote, create, build and talk. Talk to the people that matter, and work with the willing. Work to get the fence sitters to come to the right side of history. Remind them there are many more of us than there are of them. Numbers are on our side and the stakes are sky high. Tell them as you tell yourself: none of us is free until all of us are free. Stay woke.

How To Love America

A few nights ago my neighborhood filled with a haze of smoke, roads and people obscured by the fog. Just over the tops of the houses across the street, I could see a thick cloud blazing from a house on fire. Some people had been shooting off fireworks to celebrate the 4th of July when they set their own house on fire. Despite the inherent tragedy, it seemed like burning down your own house by lighting off gunpowder and throwing it on your porch seems an apt way to commemorate independence day this year. This is America.

A poll released by Gallup shows pride in America is a record low–just 47% of Americans overall say they are extremely proud of their country, and that number drops to 32% when you split along party lines to look at Dems only. Half the country loves America like a stalker screaming “I love you!” when they walk into your job with a long gun and the other half are filling out asylum applications for Canada. Just over a decade ago, more than 70% of people were extremely proud to be America. What could possibly have caused so much hatred and division? Vlad? Don? Any ideas?

It used to be easy to love America–we are, after all, the land of milk and honey. Now, though, everyone is lactose intolerant, the bees are dying and our democracy is unraveling at the seams. So desperate are we to revive the myth that everyone wants to be us that we are locking up asylum seekers, claiming there’s a wave of people pushing up from the southern border. Many people believe this narrative even though net migration has been near its lowest for several years.

Long-term relationships are hard, and when Bae isn’t treating you right it can be easier to break up than to do the work to make up. But you can’t dump your country of origin. Like a marriage or your Mom, you’re going to have to try to make this work. So this 4th of July, let’s revive our flagging love affair with America. And no, this isn’t a trip down nostalgia lane wearing a MAGA hat. These are tips for staying in the fight when you’d rather throw a firework on the porch of America and let it burn.

Affirm your commitment

Your anger, sadness, and fear are a result of seeing something you love be destroyed by clown-faced hooligans. Take a minute to focus on the first half of that. Hold onto the fact that you love this country like a life raft. Despite all that has been and all that it is now, the promise of what we could be, the natural beauty of where we are, and the vast majority of our people make the US a place worth fighting for.

Love is Accountability

Any relationship that is going to last long term is going to take a lot of work. For too long we have floated along without attending the work needed to ensure the American dream is truly available to all people. Just like Bey and Jay, once you are aware your boo has gone astray, its time to call it out, and then work it out. You can be mad about America acting a fool and still love it. You can love America and refuse to let shit go. The fun time we had ignoring our problems and yelling bling bling are gone. Time to hunker down and do the work.

Do Not Accept Violence As Love

For any relationship to last, violence has to be unacceptable. No one thrives in an abusive relationship–certainly not the victim, nor the abuser. For centuries we have had successive waves of violence aimed at nearly every part of the population. This year we have seen 157 mass shootings, many of which are spurred by the dumpster fire of hate our country has become. Call it what it is–nationalist terrorism–and demand public officials recognize it as such. Relational, political and systemic violence is rampant, from kids in cages to police brutality, to aggressive deregulation and harmful economic practices. Show up and speak out every fucking time violence erupts.

Don’t Lose Yourself

Being in love with someone who doesn’t love you back is a recipe for disaster as any decent love song will tell you. While we collectively try to love this country onto the right side of history, take time out to make sure you nurture and grow yourself. Sad to say, we are on the downhill slide, and it may take some time before we’re done with this fight. It is okay to remove yourself, to treat your wounds while the battle rages around you. We are legion, so self-care is possible and important. To give love you must first give it to yourself. Do what you need to do to keep yourself right. Fall back and pant in between crises. Paint and draw and write and plant and laugh just for your own sanity. Spend time loving the people you love. You are not America. You do not have to mirror the chaos. You can take a break from the hate to remind yourself why your life matters.

Refuse to Let the Sidechick Win

Trump enjoys wild popularity in his party–nearly 90% of Republicans have a favorable rating of the president. But the party is shrinking. As Trump does Trump, more “establishment” Republicans flee the party and our polarized system breaks down. Trump represents neither traditional political base. Ugly, attitudinal and demanding power he doesn’t have, Trump is the typical side chick. No matter how loud she gets, you can’t let her take your boo. If it means you have to slap a bitch in the elevator, so be it. Despite Trump’s claims, his rabid base is far less than half the electorate. Get your neighbors and friends into the game and remind them who this country belongs to.

Love is not easy. I’ve had enough crappy relationships to know sometimes you have to walk away. These days may have you fantasizing about Canadian bacon, but the American dream is still worth loving. This 4th of July raise your tofu pup and locally brewed craft beer to toast America. Drink up some good summertime vibes. As you watch the fireworks tonight, remember how beautiful the fight for America can be.

Evil in Real Time

On the West Coast of Africa sits a gleaming white castle where over 300,000 Africans were tortured, raped and broken before being shipped to the Americas to work until they died. I anticipated I would be moved when I visited there, and even so was unprepared for the pulsating energy of this place, the feeling of a wound that would never heal. The outside was so bright it hurt your eyes, but the dark dungeons where slaves waited months to be shipped overseas still smelled of blood and death and human fear. The tiny window that afforded Africans their last view of home before enslavement–called the door of no return–was a heartbreakingly small sliver of Ghana’s riotous beauty beyond the iron bars.

What I remember most is a staircase. It was a steep wooden staircase that was just outside of the door to the women’s dungeon. At the top of the stairs a door through which you could directly access the Governer’s bedroom. The Governor of the castle would call down to have women sent up the stairs to be raped, and then returned to the dungeon below. The dungeon was cavern-like, windowless and low ceilinged where women were sometimes stacked like wood so the slavers could fit more in. The sweat and piss and shit and fear of women leaked into the soil floor, and prisoners suffered in the squalor. From this hell, a woman would have to climb the stairs. To be raped. To be raped and returned to a dungeon.

Standing at the bottom of the stairs I could see clearly how simple the evil at the heart of slavery was. All the narratives I had been taught in school that framed slavery as a complicated economic transaction, born of naive ignorance of the humanity of Africans, or better still a Christian desire to help the less fortunate Africans live right in Christ was bullshit. It simply was not possible for the people who held slaves to not know the brutal violence they were perpetrating–they lived in intimate quarters with the results of their evil actions. They could see and hear and smell the suffering of their victims. They chose to redefine it instead of recognizing it. Every day they chose to watch death blossom around them–they were the gardeners after all. It was not possible for the governor to open that door without hearing and smelling the suffering in the dungeon below. It was not possible for him to rape captive Africans without feeling the humanity of his victims as he crushed them beneath his body, then sent them broken and battered back down to be stacked awaiting death. This evil is pure and palpable.

The great travesties of history seem unbelievable in their sheer monstrosity. How could people of good conscious watch for hundreds of years as 400,000,000 Africans were enslaved and brutalized? How could 6,000,000 Jews be shipped to concentration camps while villagers watched trains just roll by? How could 400,000 Syrians be slaughtered by their own government while the world stood down to a dictator? We could add a handful, a dozen, a hundred events to this list where people watch brutal regimes destroy their own human brethren. There is no excusing these atrocities, no reason to wonder if slavery or genocide was anything other than just evil. It is difficult looking back to accept bystanders who bore witness were innocents, free from guilt for not intervening. This seems so clear when we look at the past, but markedly less clear in our own time.

For months now Ameria has been a swirling cauldron of chaos, racism and rape allegations, North Korea nuclear brinksmanship and Trump tweets; the tweets, the tweets. Hate crimes, gun sales, and taxes on the poor are all rising. Each day brings a new attack: news media, protestors and every minority group in a never-ending rotating succession. Each day there is a new topic worthy of debate at best, outrage at worst. You could set your news cycle to fresh controversy like setting a watch.

While Trump feeds the chaos machine, the GOP has been busy trying to dismantle what we commonly think of as our democratic country: trying to repeal health care with no replacement, stacking government agencies with people on record for wanting to abolish said agencies, looming tax reform sure to line the pockets of the rich while the poor and middle class suffer and a deep recession is all but inevitable, and of course, Russia.

Remember when people thought Trump might pivot? Do you recall people saying he needed time to learn, that Trump just didn’t know what he was doing because he was, after all, a businessman? Have you listened to the mind-bending juggernaut of deception Sarah Huckabee Sanders redefine reality every day, telling us that what we have seen and heard in the observable physical world did not happen? It time to call a thing a thing.

This administration is evil. Trump and the Senate and the House are willfully and intentionally dismantling our democracy. They know what they are doing. They know how bad it is, Watch them twitch and swallow as they speak lies into the camera. Watch them bend like contortionists twisting logic to support a child predator. See how they vote, quickly, without so much as a round of town halls in their districts for the constituents that this tax bill will affect most.

We are spending our time trying to figure out why. We put them on cable news panels to hear their point of view. We have magazine profiles to learn to sympathize with the Nazi next door, and the torch-wielding all-Americans willing to blame Mexicans rather that modernization for their unemployment. We are hearing them out while they are burning our country to the ground.

The blitz of bullshit is nearly impossible to ignore–how can the President of the United States use a racial slur in front of Native American vets without us responding? We have to talk about it, there has to be a response. At the same time, we are exhausted from responding to the barrage of crises. Instead, I recommend you pick your battles. You don’t have to respond to everything. Go hard on the issues, you care about most–dig deep to research, organize activities or events and write, share and speak about what you learn. Do the easy things you can do to support people when they need a signature, an attendee, a quick phone call or a share on an issue they’re staying up on. In this way, we can build a community that can collectively address a broad array of issues and leave ourselves enough room for serious self-care and recovery time.

Be mindful of speaking the truth and calling out lies and attempts to redefine what is real. The White House’s mania for deception seems bizarre in an era with so much fact-checking, but you may not be the target of their tall tales. Their dogged lies and their undermining of legitimate reporting leave Trump supporters in the Fox bubble completely misinformed and dangerous–both in the streets and at the polls. Thirty percent of the Republican voting electorate is basically immune to reason or information, ready to rock with even the craziest and cruelest policies. You may not be able to convince your drunk uncle at Christmas, but make sure you keep yourself convinced. These days the path to truth is sometimes hard to find; better leave a breadcrumb trail so you don’t get turned around.

But most difficult of all, do not negotiate with their terror. Resist the urge to make sense of any of it. Do not accept the narrative that this evil aimed at women and minorities and immigrants is merely a position that is equal, just different, from your own. This is not normal. The destruction brought on by regulation rollbacks, tax breaks for the rich, and possible military intervention in North Korea will be real. Real people will be hurt. People have already died as a result of this administration’s policies. Lasting damage will happen to our nation. Someday someone will stand in the broken castle we leave behind and will see so clearly that it was simply evil that that plunged our nation into chaos, nothing more or less. They will wonder about you and me, wonder how we felt watching this attack on our nation. They will wonder what we did.

I hope they will wonder, too, at the courage of our voice, at the thousand ways we resisted, we fought back, until we built a shining city on the hill of what could have been our darkest hour.