A Republic In The Rain
It is April 26th, 2025, 13 weeks into the Trump Administration. I am tired, cold, soaking from the rain, and feeling older than my age. My legs and knees are in pain because a chain of 80 hour weeks stretches behind me, and I haven’t allowed sufficient time for rest and recovery. It’s my birthday tomorrow and my mortality has been weighing on my mind.
I stood near Parkman Bandstand in Boston Common at the 4th protest I have ever been to in my life. There was a preacher on the stage who spoke with a clarity and a cadence that dissolved my sense of self, in spite of my discomfort. I disappeared for a moment into the words alone and I felt nothing but the gravity of where we were and where we were going. At that moment I felt connected with history; there was a new chapter in the saga of the nation being written—unnoticed by most, but there regardless.
They feared that white men would zone them out of their homes with red lines on paper; that these machine men with machine hearts would continue to insult them, exploit them and kill them if necessary. The right to vote was not fully ensured, as decades of Jim Crow laws had accumulated on society like rust. The federal government was too feeble and too apathetic to act in the interest of all its citizens. That story started to feel intimately familiar as the threats to all of our rights multiplied. I reflected then on what drove me and many others to join a pro-democracy movement made up entirely of strangers, and I realized it was the same thing that drove the Civil Rights movement before us.
I have always been a believer in the universality of the human condition. We all have the same hopes and dreams. We all seek love and acceptance. We all struggle with the twin daemons of fear and doubt. I had an intellectual understanding of liberty and equality under the law and I have nothing to apologize for. But in that moment, the rhetoric of defiance and faith rang out and hit me with the impact of a religious awakening. The preacher's words soothed me as he told the story of the struggle of his people—and I finally understood that struggle on an emotional level.
What the African American community has suffered throughout the history of this country— blood, toil, sweat, and suffering enough to fill a book of grudges that would number a million pages—is not something I can ever really understand. The fear, though, is perhaps the worst pathology of them all. It paralyzes and possesses my thoughts, hovering like a buzzing cloud in the form of doubts about the stability of my place in the world. This gnawing sense of an unknown danger creeps out of me in nervous tics. The cortisol in my blood forces the lizard brain into an omnipresent and exhausting alertness. Nothing ever comes of my fears, and so I act normal, but I know in my soul that I am only one bad day away from a life altering catastrophe that I cannot see coming, that I cannot prevent, and that I do not deserve.
We have no right to claim the legacy of the Civil Rights movement; we have yet to earn it. However we do have an obligation to absorb its lessons, to honor its heroes, and to try to meet the moment with the same moral clarity and courage. It will be time consuming, expensive, heart-breaking and dark. Some of us might not make it, and we need to be honest about that. The Republic, which is now celebrating its 250th birthday, may not stand for its 300th if we fail to warn with sufficient alarm the danger that is at our doors. After the speech, I felt cursed with knowledge; I knew something both terrible and true. The preacher's words helped me understand a bit better the experience of existential fear, that most of us in this great country never really have to contend with.
We are just over 100 days into this administration. They have openly defied a 0-9 Supreme Court ruling against them. They have sent hundreds, most of whom were innocent and legal residents, to concentration camps in El-Salvador. Trump has persecuted some of his weakest and most vulnerable adversaries, such as students on international visas. Last week he ordered the arrest of a judge on the flimsiest of pretexts. Though the court system has stood up admirably under the assault, he managed to find one judge willing to sign off on his rancid order, and they found quisling FBI Agents to execute on that order. The Administration is building the machinery of a police state and it is beginning to exercise its muscles.
The domino effect of institutional collapse has begun and while the resistance is rising in confidence and strength, the process has a momentum of its own and will not be easily stopped. The time when the hammer blow falls the hardest and where the fate of this nation will be determined is fast approaching. I cannot say if it is in weeks or months or years—but a test of all of us is coming. Trump and his acolytes threaten to arrest governors, representatives and judges. He extorts law firms into multi-million dollar pro-bono contracts against their own interests out of fear of fiscal ruin. The unraveling of a painfully won and long enduring justice system is beginning, and with it the protections that we rely upon to remain free will be dissolved into ash. We may truly be alone soon—with nothing but our bodies and our bravery between the Administration and the principles of liberty that have governed our country for centuries.
Without that prohibition he could go after any official, at any level, and there would be no force on Earth able to stand against the might of the American security state. He could do so quickly, at scale, and without concern for the political consequences because he is systematically removing the opposition that could deny him his prize of ultimate, unfettered power. If the process is not arrested, then our experiment in self government will end. We may never see it returned within our lifetimes. This administration and its actions are a threat not just to our liberty but to the fruits of liberty. Science, art, culture and technology are all forces that depend upon an open society in order to prosper and expand.
But hope is not lost, just like it wasn’t lost when Martin Luther King Jr. and his congregation marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge into a blizzard of batons. They took the beatings arm in arm with their comrades with a song on their lips and they never raised a hand in their own defense. That simple act of defiance in the face of evil and faith that the American people would recognize the injustice they fought, did in fact change the heart of a nation from apathy to righteous anger. Though the fight continued and still does to this day, they won a small measure of the liberty which they have always been due.
We would hope to have such courage when a moment like this falls upon us, but the people who run or stand beneath the relentless terror are never the people you suspect. Who are we to have the audacity to oppose a sitting President commanding the largest accumulation of financial and military power ever assembled in the history of humankind? He has shown no restraint in his use of that power to punish his adversaries, and yet we humble, ordinary, tired and scared citizens have chosen of their own free will to become exactly that.
These forces can unbalance a soul if not handled carefully; We are not served by being self-deceptive about the risks and the danger. But we do this because we have borne witness to the past, we have embraced its lessons, and because we know it is necessary. We are united by a fear that we could lose everything but also by a conviction that this great Republic will not fall on our watch. It is the solitary thing that binds this collection of wildly different souls together. It was the same motive force that won all the great struggles of the past. The end of Apartheid in South Africa. The winning of the Second World War and the liberation of Europe. The Civil Rights movement. We will not be the last generation to enjoy the fruits of liberty so carefully tended by those that came and sacrificed before us. The burden feels heavy, but the reward is worth the chains.
I learned something today, about myself and the world. Truth isn’t always a fact you can state to win an argument; sometimes it’s a humbling appreciation that the gifts you have been given do not belong to you. Sometimes history will ask you to return them in part or in whole. I want to be the kind of person that can be counted on to do that, but no one can be certain that they will be when the full weight of destiny's demands is revealed to them. Of all my fears—this is the one that makes me tired and cold most of all. But I’m still here—because all the things we value as human beings depend upon it, and those who came before us have already proven that it can be done. So it must be done.
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