Image: StockCake

Returning from summer vacation, the atmosphere in the country, sadly, remains unchanged.

While future commentaries will highlight America’s triumphs as well as the times we found the courage to correct our course, the challenges before us now are too flagrant to ignore: the same divisions, the same anger, the same refusal to face reality persist.

With armed National Guard units in our nation’s capital, Trump has threatened more troops in cities across the country—all of it chipping away at the pillars of law that have guided us for nearly 250 years.

He is not only dismantling democracy, he’s dismantling our strength, our respect, and our trust in each other, along with institutions like the CDC, which for decades advanced public health for all Americans regardless of politics.

Thousands of civil servants who placed the public’s needs above party loyalty have been fired or forced to resign. The reason? They failed to support “the president’s agenda,” many branded members of a so-called “deep state.”

The latest outrage: January 6 rioters—granted full due process for crimes we all witnessed live on television—have not only been pardoned by the president, but, with support from some congressional Republicans, are now seeking $100 million in restitution.

Under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dr. Susan Monarez—the Senate-confirmed CDC Director—was dismissed after refusing to implement Kennedy’s directives on vaccines and staff purges. The same man who once praised her as a “public health expert with unimpeachable scientific credentials.” Well, now she’s “peachable.”

Seventeen experts on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices have been dismissed. Nine former CDC directors wrote in the New York Times: “Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans… Amid the largest measles outbreak in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines.”

Children in schools—packed in close quarters—are placed at serious risk by decisions made by a man with neither a medical degree nor clinical experience.

This is madness.

Over Labor Day weekend, the administration sought to return hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children—many of whom fled abuse or lacked due process—on flights back to Guatemala. Federal judges summarily halted the action…for now.

At the Smithsonian—long a guardian of the nation’s triumphs as well as its mistakes—Trump ordered curators to revise exhibits deemed “anti-American,” replacing them with a distorted narrative of “American Exceptionalism” that erases hard truths and sanitizes history.

We all need to stop the bickering, face the facts, and see the reality before us: a man who will not stop at anything—including Constitutional safeguards—to get his way with everything from public health to the rule of law, by executive order or Supreme Court emergency hearings. That’s chilling.

With every insult and outrage, we grow smaller by the hour.

I don’t want to live that way. And I don’t believe most Americans do.

What holds us together is steadier: decency, honesty, respect. But what’s required now is the willingness to change.

Are we willing to look past the chaos long enough to see one another as fellow citizens? Past the anger long enough to call on the better angels of our nature and summon the courage to let them guide us—and the humility to listen when they speak?

That is not weakness, that’s strength—the strength that built this democracy and carried it through storms darker than the one we face now.

We don’t need slogans to make America anything. We need to live the values that have always defined our best moments—with courage, and with the willingness to see one another as neighbors, not enemies.

“Down the long lane of history yet to be written,” President Eisenhower said in his farewell address, “America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”

Are we willing to see the light of mutual strength, trust, and respect before us?

That is the choice before us.