longer.blue

We want our country back. Your neighbor is not your enemy. The teacher down the street. The farmer in Iowa. The Black mother in the Bronx. The white guy driving a pickup truck in Kentucky. The immigrant pouring concrete in August. The boy holding another boy's hand. The MAHA mom reading the ingredients on a cereal box. None of them is your enemy. We have been sold a magnificent steaming pile of bull. We have been told that America is two hungry tribes crouched on opposite sides of a river, sharpening knives, waiting for the opportunity to wade across and murder one another. The great political scam of our time was convincing 340 million people who share a country, schools, roads, rivers, grocery stores, hospitals, fears, children, mortgages, illnesses, dreams and funerals that we have nothing in common. That we are enemies. There is an enormous amount we agree on. We want clean water. Clean air. We don’t want corporations filling our children’s bodies with poison. We don’t want plastic in our oceans, our soil, our blood and our babies. We want food that is actually food. We want our children educated. We want to be able to go to the doctor without wondering whether the bill will bankrupt us. We want a decent job. We want Social Security when we’re old. We want politicians to stop using public office as an ATM. We don’t want political violence. We don’t want our government owned by billionaires. We want our votes to matter. We want a country where the law applies to the rich person in the penthouse as surely as it applies to the poor person standing before a judge. And while we’re being made afraid of one another, somebody is picking our pockets. The billionaires figured something out before the rest of us did: Anger, fear, loneliness, and resentment are business models. And Donald Trump understood the product better than anybody. Grievance. Barrels and barrels of grievance. Bottle it. Brand it. Sell it. Tell a man whose factory disappeared that an immigrant stole his country. Tell a struggling mother that some other struggling mother is getting something she isn’t. Tell rural America the cities despise them. Tell the cities rural America wants to destroy them. Tell white people Black people are coming for them. Tell Black people every white neighbor is secretly waiting to put them back in chains. Keep everybody suspicious. Keep everybody angry. Keep everybody separated. Rape us one by one. Then watch as Trump and the billionaires walk through the wreckage taking everything. We all see it. Democracy will be saved by finding the places where we already agree and building from there. Citizenship is not a subscription service. Democracy is not something delivered to your doorstep. You don’t get to order it from Amazon. You don’t get to complain that democracy is dying while sitting on the toilet scrolling Instagram. Democracy requires something from us. Time. Courage. Attention. Neighbors. Argument. Forgiveness. Work. And sometimes the willingness to stand up and say No. No, you will not make me hate my neighbor. No, you will not make me afraid of somebody because they pray differently or vote differently or love differently or were born somewhere else. You will not convince me that cruelty is strength. You will not convince me that corruption is patriotism. You will not convince me that billionaires need another tax break while teachers buy their own pencils. No, you will not divide us and then sell off the pieces to the oligarchs. Reimagine the country. Rebuild the democracy. Rework the communities. Find each other again. Fight like hell for the enormous territory we share. Because beneath all the noise, bull, algorithms, and campaign advertisements, there is still a country here. Ours.