Are you feeling this, America?
What is unfolding at the Kennedy Center:
This joyous subtraction.
This glorious removal.
This is the collective jubilation of watching a vile disfigurement reversed, a terrible stain erased, a brutal injury repaired.
With the smallest restoration of justice unfolding on a massive wall of white marble, we are experiencing on a microscopic scale what it feels like when a tyrant falls.
And this is just a heartening foretaste of what is coming if we choose to manifest it together.
It can be a harbinger of what is possible; the nation we might still fashion out of the hideous bastardization we have become, but only if we remember who the hell we are and what is still within our hands.
We can be blamed for our shared amnesia.
For a decade, we have been living inside a malignant narcissist’s fever dream, never getting to fully exhale from one unprecedented violation of Democracy or humanity or legality before being thrust into another. The relentlessness has been both by design and effective.
We’ve begun to believe that this lawless authoritarianism is our fate, that our termination has been ordained, that the funeral for our Republic is inevitable. We’ve allowed ourselves to be gaslighted into apathy and beaten into resignation, believing that our agency has all but evaporated.
But those twelve letters ripped from their unearned spot on hallowed ground remind us that we can always reverse our course into the abyss in the way that so many other beleaguered nations have done before us; by wielding the weapon of our collective humanity like a wrecking ball.
We can, and we will tear it all the hell down, demolish every garish monument to his vanity. We can, and we will, take back every undeserved spoil, rebuild every bulldozed bit of history. We can, and we will, rewrite the pathetic fiction he has spent crafting where he is noble, revered, or beloved.
Like those letters, his efforts to craft his legacy will all fall. The raking light of truth will eventually burn away all his desperate myths typed out in midnight all-caps diatribes.
Before this is over, We the People are going to take that vile, traitorous sex offender’s name and handprints off of every part of this nation that he has poisoned and polluted over the last decade.
He and his cadre of racist, phobic, sycophantic enablers are going to be made legally and politically accountable, and together, we are going to course correct from the greatest shared error in our 250-year history.
He will not write our epitaph.
We will outvote and outnumber and outlove his cultic disciples and tear down every remnant of him and of his disgraceful movement.
First, this single wall of marble and then our beloved nation, both can be freed from the sickening stain of his cancerous presence once and for all.
May all decent, patriotic Americans be heard and counted in these moments.
May the demolition of his inhumanity begin.
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