I remain highly optimistic about our future. In fact, it feels strange to say this, but a not-so-small part of me is glad that so much horror is playing out in our country right now, simply because it has finally forced us to confront what democracy actually is.
We took it for granted for at least half a century.
I remember learning in school how fragile democracy is, how freedom must be defended constantly. We just sort of accepted that premise, because throughout my life, there always seemed to be people in charge who at least pretended to believe it.
Pretending, it turns out, was doing a lot of work.
I grew up afraid of Black people. I’ll say that plainly, because it wasn’t a choice I made. It was a consequence of the environment I happened to be born into.
I grew up afraid of them because there weren’t any around.
I grew up in the whitest white-bread neighborhood you could imagine: the Levitt home community of Hicksville, Long Island. Next door to the more famous, but essentially identical, Levittown.
I grew up afraid of Black people because nearly every adult in my orbit told me they were dangerous for one ridiculous, invented reason or another. Not my parents, I’m happy to say. But if there were other adults around me who didn’t hold that belief, I can’t think of any.
So when my father, a police officer, was injured by a Black man during a jailbreak riot outside his station when I was nine, that didn’t help. Family, neighbors, acquaintances were quick with their sneers, their knowing looks, their casual certainty.
Don’t worry. I’m getting to the optimistic part.
Slowly, I broke free of that world.
First, I went to Catholic high school, where roughly a third of the student body was Black. I know it was about a third because there were three large seating sections in the cafeteria, and the Black kids occupied one of them, while the white kids took up the other two.
For someone taught to fear them my entire life, I was suddenly dropped into a building with hundreds of Black people.
And you’ll never guess what happened.
I learned they were pretty cool. Many became my friends. They were exactly like me in every conceivable way. By the time I graduated, I was no longer afraid of Black people, nor have I ever allowed other people’s prejudices to stand in for my own judgment.
It was a spectacular lesson.
And while I still feel anger that I was conditioned to fear an entire group of people based on nothing more than the color of their skin, it’s also true that my respect and admiration for people who do not look or think like me is as strong as it is precisely because I had to fight for it and overcome programming to the contrary.
I never forget that.
Which brings me back to democracy.
We’ve been taking it for granted for as long as I’ve been alive.
We took for granted that leaders would respect the Constitution.
We took for granted that losing an election meant conceding, because the continuity of democracy mattered more than any one outcome.
We took for granted that despite deep political disagreements, there was a shared commitment to something larger than individual grievance or tribal loyalty.
We took all of that for granted.
And apparently, much of it was pretend.
What January 6 revealed wasn’t just violence. It revealed how thin the performance had become. How many people had been acting out the role of “patriot” without understanding the responsibilities that role actually carries.
Costumes. Symbols. Chants. Cameras. Flags turned into props. Institutions turned into stages.
It was violent cosplay.
Not action rooted in accountability, but performance mistaken for purpose. A moment where pretending didn’t spill into responsibility, but replaced it entirely.
The same people who would have demanded blood for the Black man who injured my father suddenly found endless excuses for white men beating police officers on the steps of the Capitol. The violence didn’t change. The targets didn’t change. Only the story did.
That day made something impossible to ignore.
There are people in this country who would rather see everything burn than watch anyone they perceive as “other” thrive. People willing to harm themselves so long as someone else suffers a little more. People who confuse domination with strength, cruelty with conviction.
And what made it possible wasn’t belief.
It was performance.
Because when pretending is all there is, there’s nothing left to restrain it. No grounding. No consequence. No shared reality to return to.
Five years later, there’s no shock left. No plausible deniability. No way to pretend this is normal.
The costumes remain. The bravado remains. The theater remains.
But the illusion is thinner now.
And that’s where the optimism comes in.
Because once pretending is exposed for what it is, it loses its power. You can’t unknow what you’ve seen. You can’t unsee the gap between performance and responsibility.
When this chapter finally closes — and it will — we won’t be returning to any comfortable status quo that came before. We’ll have the opportunity to rebuild with clearer eyes.
There will be no room for leaders who swear allegiance to the Constitution one day and kneel before billionaires, donors, and concentrated wealth the next.
Democracy won’t be something we assume anymore.
Because this time, it won’t be an abstract concept we learned in fourth grade social studies.
It will be a treasure we had to fight for.
