How did we get here? It’s urgent that we scramble out of this descent into tyranny, and I’m convinced we need to dig into how we let this happen, in order to get sustainable footholds out of it. For such a long time we’ve othered ourselves from one another, creating cracks and rifts open to manipulation. We’ve been exploited, condescended to, lied to and about, and we’ve let each other and ourselves be treated as eminently disposable. We’ve enabled it to evolve to this point because for most of us it wasn’t quite personal enough to bother getting upset and involved. Me and mine were okay. Shame about what’s happening to that family over there, though. Sigh. Moving on with our day, our week, our life, we let charlatans spread from carnival barking loners to preachers’ pulpits, opening lanes for vigilantes, online influencers, click bait drivers, and political “outsiders” who wheedled their way into our local, state and national offices. We were wheedled willingly, giving our votes to people who aligned with our grievances. Or worse, not giving anyone our votes. Civically active people nodded politely when neighbors or relatives insisted they’re not into politics. Sitting out elections in a democracy is a deadly choice. We didn’t press, didn’t shine light on what it means to live in a free and open society – and what it looks like when we don’t. We ignored the hypocrisy of shallow minds in our midst. The blowhard down the block who never voted but liked to bellyache about socialism, also liked to have a timely competent response when he called 911, and to have a letter delivered to anywhere in the country for the cost of a postage stamp. Public schools, public libraries, clean streets, ethical cops, all of these and more are fruits of effective government. They’ve long been more effective and available for some than for others, and that struggle has awakened both advocates for change and defenders of the status quo. By not standing up for and clearly explaining positive places effective government touches all our lives, we who knew better ceded the field to liars who rode in with increasingly aggressive arguments that government per se is the problem, rather than a result of the people in it, and in turn a reflection of the voters who put them there. Civitas is defined in wikipedia as a collection of people, aka citizens, united by laws. These laws confer both responsibilities and rights. Our laws determine what our government can and cannot do. We elect lawmakers to write and adjust our laws, supposedly. Instead though, lately we’ve often chosen to give our votes to liars who pander to our laziest selves: our anti-citizen id who wants all the rights and none of the responsibilities.  

Lies have always been with us. And they’ve always been hard to face but essential to address. From the abolition of slavery we slid into reconstruction and Jim Crow with forked tongues and two-faced hearts that would (and probably do) make Stephen Miller proud. Manifest destiny and the Trail of Tears were taught in schools as though they weren’t inextricably linked facets on a single arrogant sphere of bigotry and greed. Straight faces prevailed when we told ourselves interning Japanese Americans had been acceptable, and when we were never told about how our country stripped Native American children from their families and cultures, nor about massacres such as Wilmington and Greenwood, fomented by white Americans’ fear and anger that black Americans could and did also excel and build thriving communities. The privileged and safe among us lately, failed to step up hard enough and look truthfully enough into our lies and our darkness, which could have led us to forge it into a new thing, a common ground of shared hopes. Instead, foundational to our current dilemmas are the many ways we’ve ceased to view ourselves as bound up with each other and with each other’s fates. I look out for number one, you take care of you and yours. If the twain never meet then we are all lost. 

Examples abound of blindness we’ve embraced and enabled by tolerating this elevation of othering. Recently an earnest-seeming, late thirties-ish, wealthy-looking white woman took to her tiktok with a tale of woe. She has a real concern: she experienced a miscarriage and was told by her local hospital they could do nothing to remove the now toxic as well as dead fetus within her. She must go home and continue to miscarry, complete with the dangers, fears, pain and discomfort associated with this path. She outlined a now all too familiar scenario, familiar to those of us who’ve been sentient about reproductive rights and freedoms anyway. She described the ordeal she faces, with tearful mentions of her three living children, her role as wife, her small business, all now in potential peril from this threat to her health and life. It’s a horrific story. Each time it happens, it’s horrific and unacceptable. The part that repulses me – and I freely admit I need a new response within myself – is that this privileged blond woman is only now waking up, only because it’s happening to her. She wraps up her story with an emotional claim: “I didn’t vote for this.” YES, YOU DID. You voted to overturn reproductive rights. You voted for all of this destruction. Not just for the other guy [sic]. 

We are too often lately a nation of doubting Thomases, undervaluing the testimony of our neighbors and fellow citizens, pretending that until and unless it literally touches our own household, that it’s okay to act like we’re unaware of the harms from an autocracy that relentlessly undermines science, medicine, rule of law, democracy, and critical thinking. I’m as tired of hearing Trump’s apologists claim they didn’t vote for this, as I am of hearing “this is not who we are.” Tell that to Joselli Barnica’s surviving husband, raising a daughter by himself after his wife died in Texas, or Candi Miller’s widower, solo parenting his son and daughter in Georgia now, for the same outrageous reason that the Karen from tiktok now finds herself shocked that these dominionist elected officials are delivering on their promises, for which she DID vote.

What is wrong with us, that myriad women who told their stories before the 2024 election never penetrated that particular Karen’s bubble? Why did the women’s deaths and orphaned children reported on since the ravages of Dodds v. Jackson Women’s Health Center were unleashed on American women and families and doctors, not sink in? It’s not until her miscarriage requires medical attention, that the brazen misogyny of her chosen politicians dawns on her. It’s not until her other children face the possibility of losing their mother, that it occurs to her that ignorant hubris-filled local legislators decreeing what doctors can and cannot do for their patients, might be a terrible idea.

Escalating additional examples continue, accompanied by a glimpse into how we can move through this horror. Authoritarian lawlessness in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis starkly demonstrates both the terror that an unaccountable federal government can try to wield over our populace, and the grave true risks our fellow citizens remain willing to take for each other. It’s a scary moment. Part of the fear is whether we will meet it. White nationalists and dominionists and their allies have the bit between their teeth and they’re all in. We need to recognize these nascent authoritarians will not be convinced to change their stripes at this point. We must be as united and determined about telling the truth, as they are about lying. We need to care deeply about each other, regardless of whether we’re of the same creed or color, whether we need the same medical care and access, whether we face the same urgent peril or have the same citizenship papers. We have to build (I’m purposefully not saying re-build) a true faith in mutual outcomes and shared sacrifice. One for all, all for one. Civitas together. 

Years ago, I visited a devastating historical site, the Dachau concentration camp. I will always be grateful that I went there with a thoughtful, serious, compassionate, thoroughly educated and trained guide from the In Their Shoes group. It’s a heart breaking and heart opening experience. One powerful take-home is that we have to acknowledge who we are, and what we can do and have done to each other, before we can hope to heal or change, to do and become better. The white (and other) Americans who get themselves to sleep at night in the face of blatantly racist policies, public statements, and rampant acts such as kidnapping black and brown people without even a pretense of a semblance of due process, by telling themselves “this is not who we are” fail to grasp the gravity of our depravity. And I do mean ours. All of us are in on this, to the extent that we’re not calling out the lies, and contacting our elected officials consistently to demand they clearly state their beliefs and defend their actions or failures to act. Some are waking up now, upon seeing white people murdered before our eyes too, by our government. Not before time. 

Careless obliviousness to our fellow humans’ plight seeped into our pores and turned tiny cracks of overwhelm into fissures of denial. We missed how activated the tiny minded, dark hearted Americans were by a black President and incremental momentum toward a functioning multiracial democracy. We paused, telling ourselves what was directly in front of us mattered more than what surrounded us across the nation. We failed to persistently discuss, expose, and oppose real world consequences of white supremacists and theocrats embedding themselves – via our neighbors’ votes – into echelons of power across our government and economy. Their moral turpitude is ours, until we rise meaningfully to support voices of truth and integrity calling us back toward striving to be better. Not “back” to a nation that fancies itself flawless – t.h.a.t. Is not who we are. Making ourselves so-called great again was a trap and it still is. We are imperfect, and we need each other. These confessions sound frightening to a bully, and to a demagogue, and to their accomplices and acolytes. Yet these very confessions are freeing to people ready to do the work and bind ourselves to each other in the ways all religions at their core instruct us to do. Call it virtue, reciprocity, common sense, ‘Urf, right action, the commons, the golden rule, kindness. Love by any name requires no less of us.  

We need to grow from a nation who will not stand up for each other, into a nation that will not stand for tyranny nor white supremacy nor cruelty nor authoritarianism. The liars’ time is up.