As I finished up my transaction, I noticed the clerk’s expression–the portion visible above her mask. “Everything okay? Is your family healthy?” I asked.  She shook her head and closed her eyes tight, fighting tears. “No, everything’s not okay. My dad’s dying, and we’re taking him off life support today.” Standing six feet away from her, I started to tear up, too. Her father had battled Covid-19 in a hospital in a faraway state. “He’s going to die alone,” she said.

Normally I respond to this kind of suffering with physical connection, and yet I could not hug her or even touch her arm gently. I apologized for not being able to physically comfort her and then asked about her dad’s name. I wanted to keep him in my thoughts and wish him a gentle passage from this life. This did not feel like nearly enough; I walked to the car with a very heavy heart.

We are fatigued and frustrated by the pandemic. We are lonely, cut off from family and friends, and unmoored by a situation largely beyond our control. When we’re scared and self-protective, it’s exhausting to pivot outward and put energy into the communities that bind us together. But that’s exactly what we must do. This is not the time to scold each other about masks or family visits or to sit in judgment of our neighbors. As our infection rate continues to rise, we have to work to cultivate a sense of purpose and to remind each other that our community connections will help us ride out this very painful time.

In challenging moments, the work of UCLA philosophy professor Pamela Hieronymi has helped me reframe my frustration. In an interview about agency and responsibility from March of this year, Hieronymi explains that reactive attitudes—resentment, indignation but also gratitude—are the responses we have to what we perceive as the motivation for other peoples’ behavior. If I perceive that you have disrespected me or disregarded me by not wearing a mask, for example, I’m likely to feel resentment and indignation. But if I remember that we all feel uneasy and fearful, I can let go of some of my indignation and remember that I can’t know all that an individual stranger is holding inside.

Yes, we’re heading into a long, cold winter made all the more bitter by this pandemic raging across the nation, largely unchecked. But we shouldn’t forget that our response here in Vermont has been quite good. Rates of transmission have been low, and a lot of Vermonters are following Governor Scott’s and Dr. Mark Levine’s recommendations. We are community-minded, and we haven’t seen significant partisan rancor about our response to the pandemic. We must keep this in mind.

As more Vermonters contract Covid-19, I know it’s tempting for us to start using language like: This is no time to let up! We can’t get complacent! Don’t blow it now after all our hard work!  But honestly, we all know that nagging doesn’t work. And, as Professor Hieronymi notes, scolding each other doesn’t bring us closer together; it just breeds resentment. Instead, let’s remind each other of our connectedness: We are a small state with tight knit communities. Let’s keep taking care of each other. Look after your family and your neighbors.

Let me be clear, I’m not some saint. I sometimes think snarky thoughts when I see someone waltz into the supermarket without a mask on. But I try to check my indignation by making a mental note to do something for a neighbor or for my community. We must all continue to build on the great work we’ve already done in Vermont. Pivoting towards each other and not away from each other is what will see us through.

(This is the text of a sermon I gave on November 22, 2020 at the Mount Mansfield Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.)

I want to start my sermon with this simple truth: Stories are powerful. 

They entertain, they instruct, and they can carry the force of history and the weight of tradition over hundreds–even thousands of years.

But we often ignore the power of our own narratives–the stories we tell about ourselves that may limit us or free us. So frequently, we underestimate the extent to which we can change the stories that we tell about ourselves. Today I want to propose to you that we are writing a critical chapter in America’s story: the story of an ongoing, unfulfilled quest for liberty and justice for all.

One story that has deeply shaped my family and me is the story of what happened to my grandfather in the spring of 1945.

On April 22, 1945, my paternal grandfather, Leopold Bálint, (Leo to his friends and family) was killed on a forced march from Mauthausen Concentration Camp just two weeks away from the camp’s liberation. My grandfather Leo stopped to assist another ailing prisoner. He knew, as they all did, that stopping along the march meant certain death, but like so many others–before and after him–his humanity and empathy overpowered his fear. Leo wrapped this man’s arm about his shoulder, put his own around the weary man’s waist, and dragged him along for a short distance. His already low reserves were soon spent, and they fell dangerously behind the group. As eyewitnesses informed my grandmother afterwards, both Leo and his comrade were summarily shot and their bodies heaved into the chilly waters of the Danube.

I know Leopold only from the family stories I have heard. But my grandfather’s murder has colored all of our lives. As Elie Weisel has written:

“Time does not heal all wounds; there are those that remain painfully open.”

My father and I, and now my son, too, we look a lot like Leo. Similar eyes and lips and chin. It is at once eerie and comforting. He lives on in our DNA; he is with us on a cellular level.

I inherited my sense of humor, my insatiable curiosity, and a deep love of history from both of my parents.  But I also learned to be standoffish, even suspicious of neighbors.  

My father was always, and remains, hesitant about connecting with neighbors. I used to chalk it up to European manners, but in my adulthood I have come to realize that this too is a scar of the Holocaust. Neighbors can betray you; indeed they did betray him and his family.

When my grandfather had a bathtub installed in their apartment building,  the neighbors griped that “those dirty, stinking Jews are bathing too much.”

Or the worst story of all – the trusted teacher who gathered information from his young students about who had Jewish parents. One ongoing toll of the Holocaust and indeed of all totalitarian regimes — beyond the destruction of families, the loss of faith, and the enormous grief — is that we start to doubt our neighbors’ basic humanity. We come to believe it’s safer to keep them at a distance because people can sometimes be so horribly callous.

This is the family story I am trying to change. I believe strong neighbors make strong democracy.

It helps that Vermont’s size makes it a state of neighbors. My dad has slowly come to understand that my family and I love our town. We feel safe here. But he still occasionally comments about his personal discomfort with small town life. One of the first things he asked when we bought our house in Brattleboro was: How are the neighbors? Will they accept your family?

He worries that the country still isn’t really accepting of an openly gay politican. He worries that neighbors can betray.

Writer Daniel Goldhagen argued in his controversial 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners that many Germans were willing to participate in the final solution because German culture and society had indoctrinated them in “eliminationist anti-semitism.” 

Many historians excoriated the book, maintaining that his research was shoddy and that Goldhagen ignored any material that did not prove his thesis. But he still became something of a celebrity on his book tour in Germany. 

Despite its academic shortcomings, the book resonated with many Germans. They understood that Hitler’s ghastly plans were only set in motion because average people told themselves there was nothing they could do. They chose to look the other way.

When faced with these stories of atrocity, of complicity, and of bravery, we often ask ourselves: Would I have had the courage to stand up and do the right thing?

But most of us will never be faced with such a stark situation, so I think that this is perhaps the wrong question. The real question is: Do I have the courage, day in and day out, to show kindness to and concern for my neighbors? 

The small gestures do matter. When I bake bread for a neighbor (even if our politics don’t align) or check on another when she’s sick (although she sometimes talks my ear off), I’m asserting that there is still basic humanity in the world. I do it for me, for my parents, for my children, and for their great-grandfather, Leopold Bálint who retained his humanity in the midst of the depravity.

And now, I do it, too, for my nation. 

Like many of you, perhaps, I thought that we were farther along in our evolution as Americans, as human beings. But these past four years have revealed just how far we still must go on our national journey towards true justice. At times, the work feels so overwhelming and so tiring. 

It’s easy to lose hope.  It’s easy to give in to despair. 

But I want to remind you all–We are not the same people we were on election night in 2016. Many Americans are newly activated, finally turning out to vote in large numbers. Finally taking to the streets to stand with our Black and Brown neighbors. Finally truly understanding that democracy only works if we participate. We must be all in. 

I sense a new awakening inside so many Americans and an understanding that this experiment in democracy is actually pretty young and, as it turns out, pretty fragile. We have to commit to fighting for it. We have to feel the urgency and the purpose. I know we will come out of this darkness, but we must be focused and determined.

On election day, while standing at the polls, I had the lyrics and music of singer/songwriter Bernice Johnson Reagon in my head. She wrote these words based on the writings of civil rights activist Ella Baker.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest. We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.

Ella Josephine Baker was a truly remarkable woman. It’s astounding that so many Americans don’t know her name and her work. She was a highly effective civil rights and human rights activist. Baker did most of her work behind-the-scenes, living her ferverent belief in on the ground organizing. 

Baker’s work spanned more than half a century, and she worked alongside WEB DuBois, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. Baker also mentored emerging activists like Stokely Carmicheal and Rosa Parks. Her talents touched so many aspects of the civil rights movement. And she played a key role in many of the most influential organizations of the time: the NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Baker believed that we can ignite change by uncovering and using the power of regular people to reshape our communities, to write our own stories and to shape our own destinies. 

Ella Baker, like so many black women before and after her, knew that we have no time for despair. We do not have the luxury of losing hope. 

As I said, her words were on my lips and in my head on election day this year.  As I sang them softly, 

We who believe in freedom cannot rest

I felt anticipation and excitement. It was the same kind of stirring I felt back in ‘08 when I made calls into PA for the Obama campaign.

It’s this feeling that we are on the verge of a new generosity of spirit, a renewed commitment to justice and righteousness. An understanding–a great realization that we all truly have a part to play in this big change– the shift towards being willing, being finally willing, as a nation to confront our demons and our shortcomings.

For too long, people of color have done this work in the face of opposition from even well-meaning, left-leaning white people.  We must join with them to continue this work. To pick up where Ella Baker and Dr. King and John Lewis and Shirly Chisholm left off.  

If we do it right, it will be our children and our children’s children who will finish it. And the generations who come after us will continue to be vigilant to protect this republic that we were able to pull back from the brink.  That is the story I am telling myself. And I hope you will join me in the telling. 

I do not have rose colored glasses on. As I said, I am the grandchild of a man murdered in the Holocaust. I know people can be horribly cruel and inhumane. But I also know that racist and xenophobic populism can be defeated, it must be defeated, it will be defeated. Because there are more of us who are ready to fight for justice than there are Americans who feel comforted by our president’s flirtation with facism.

There are millions of us bound together. Millions together in this commitment to each other and to our nation.

We who believe in freedom can not rest until it comes.

I started my remarks this morning with acknowledging the power of stories to help shape us and to give our lives meaning and purpose. And I reminded us that we have the power to rewrite our stories, our personal stories and the stories we tell about our nation. 

As a historian, I’m keenly interested in the story that will be told about the past four years and about this election.

The story of this election victory is, undoubtedly, the story of the labor of black women. Black women voters are the most formidible and consistent voting bloc for Democratic candidates. Period. 

Let me say this clearly because in a state like Vermont it can be hard to believe: more white men voted for Trump than for Biden.  More white WOMEN voted for Trump than for Biden. 

America has been saved from the destruction of our republic because of the fierce organizing of Southern Black women like Stacey Abrams, who launched Fair Fight, and LaTosha Brown, who co-founded Black Voters Matter. 

Abrams didn’t cry in her coffee after the ongoing voter suppression in her homestate blocked her from victory in the Georigia gubernatorial election. She felt there was no time to mourn; she had to organize. She– like so many other black women before her–did the nation’s labor.

As Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper has pointed out: “Black women leaders are so important to this democracy precisely because they dare to keep dreaming, even after the immediacy of a perpetual nightmare like Donald Trump.”

Joe Biden was able to win because of black women.

Kamala Harris was able to win because of black women.

The president was beaten at the ballot box because of black women.

The stories we tell about this election, about our nation, must be rooted in an enduring truth:

We will never fulfill the promise of our nation’s ideals without black women at the table, in the halls of power, in our national psyche.

These women inspire me in my own work. They give me courage when it falters. They give me strength when I have self doubt.

Years ago, I got some simple advice that has stayed with me–what people think of you is none of your business. You can’t control what is said about you, how it is interpreted, or how far the stories will travel. 

What we can control are the Stories that we tell about ourselves. And how we allow ourselves to be moved and inspired by meaning making.

I am about to be elected the first female president pro tem in the history of the Vermont Senate. I will also be the first LGBTQ legislator to lead either chamber. 

This will be an exciting moment for so many people across our state, and it will be scary and intimidating to others, including some of my senate colleagues, I’m sure.

My election to the position of president pro tem will be unconsciously (and perhaps consciously in some instances) perceived as a threat. I challenge long-held ideas about what a leader looks like. I will have to find a way to address these concerns within the senate without elevating the naysayers or ignoring their fears.

A key to successful change is bringing people collectively into the conversation about solutions and highlighting for them the ways in which sharing power will not necessarily diminish their own power AND in fact will probably lead to better outcomes for all of us.

As we do this work, this work of collective action towards justice, we need to help each other to continue to pivot towards hope. We have to channel our curiosity and wonder and our belief that we really can make positive change. We have to help each other have difficult conversations. We have to help each other imagine new and different endings. We have to tell new stories about who we are, and what this nation can become. It’s the only way through.

I’m humbled and frankly, a bit daunted by the task ahead of me, but I know that I’m not alone in this work. Millions of us are in this together. 

My grandfather, whose smile I inherited, will be with me as I work alongside all of you to protect our democracy and to serve the community of man.

.

A dear friend recently had a terrible accident. She was doing an inversion on her pull-up bar when the bar detached from the ceiling. She crashed hard to the floor. Because there was no mat down to break her fall, she broke her back in several places and fractured her skull. In the blink of her eye, her life changed. Astonishingly, she didn’t damage her spinal cord even though she’d gotten up to walk, not realizing her back was broken. (Clearly, she’s stoic and can deal with a lot of pain.) 

She’s now facing a long, painful recovery and is understandably daunted by it. But she also knows how close she came to losing her ability to walk, and she’s grateful that she’s not more injured. She told me, “I try not to think about what could have happened; it’s just too overwhelming. I’m very lucky.”

We talked the other day about how this experience will certainly change her. Having to deal with the physical pain would be more than enough for her to handle over the next few months. But with physical trauma also comes psychological challenges. She now celebrates victories that two weeks ago would have felt absurd: being able to walk ½ a block or walking up the front steps to her house. When she regains her full strength, which probably won’t be for 6 months, she won’t look at skiing, running, biking or rock climbing the same way again. She will have a changed relationship with her body. No doubt she will also experience a shifting sense of who she is in the world. Traumatic events change us and oftentimes the people around us, too.

I was shaken by the enormity of her injury and how quickly it happened. I’ve also been worried about her and sad as I ponder how long it will take her to recover. But something unexpected also happened to me; I feel a new urgency and clarity in my own life. I’ve always been someone who wants to suck the marrow out of life, and my personality tends towards optimism; that hasn’t changed. What has changed is that I’ve realized that I really don’t know how long I’ll have on this earth. (Of course, we all know this on some level, but we resist thinking about it too deeply because it’s awfully scary.)  In the last week I’ve felt a shift in my thinking–or perhaps it’s more like a new resolve. I must fully dive into what I’m called to do now because in a blink of an eye everything might change. And for me to do the work I’m called to do, and be successful at it, I need to concentrate on the positive.

When I have moments of insight like this, I often turn to the work of Dr. Martin Seligman, who’s often referred to as the “Father of Positive Psychology.” Seligman directs the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center. His research focuses on theories of learned helplessness, depression, resilience, optimism, pessimism and positive psychology. In his 1991 book, Learned Optimism, Seligman wrote,

“The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe that bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe that defeat is just a temporary setback or a challenge, that its causes are just confined to this one case.”

It would be fairly easy for my injured friend to dwell on the fact that she didn’t put a mat under her pull-up bar. Or that she didn’t have an experienced carpenter check out her installation of the bar before she used it. She will have an easier recovery–psychologically and emotionally–by accepting that bad things sometimes happen to good people. This is a temporary (albeit painful) setback, not an indication that bad luck will continue to rain down on her.

Even optimists like myself can use reminders to dwell in gratitude. I recently learned of a daily practice developed by Seligman that’s been shown to increase happiness and feelings of satisfaction. It’s called “Three Good Things,” and I’m going to start doing this short exercise each evening before bed. It doesn’t take that much time, and it shifts my thinking into a positive frame of mind before I close out my day.

I’m going to do this exercise every day for at least one week, hopefully two. I’ll write down three things that went well for me on that day and explain why I think they went well. They can be small things: my coworker surprised me by bringing me a latte. Or they can be large things: I finished a really big, important project and my colleagues praised my work. The important thing is to include as much detail about the events as possible, including an explanation for why I think this event came to pass.

Why do this? We all tend to take for granted the good things and the kind people in our lives. We don’t mean to overlook them, but we often do. They just become such an expected part of our everyday lives that we forget that these people and events add beauty and meaning to our days. When we forget to be grateful for the warmth of the woodstove or the steamy cup of coffee that someone made for us–we miss many simple but rich moments of connection

By focusing my attention on being grateful and allowing myself to dwell in possibility, I’m happier and more content. I’m also a much more effective leader and public servant becuase I have more energy and belief in my ability to get things done. I told this to my friend who’s slowly healing from her nasty back injury. She said that knowing I can make a positive shift in my thinking because of what happened to her somehow makes her journey a little easier.

Last night I sat with dear friends around a campfire. Socially distanced but encircling the warmth of the fire, we laughed and wisecracked under the stars. The air was that most delicious of Vermont delights–a breeze that was cool and crisp and hopeful. The wood smoke, the fall leaves, and the sweet smell of the grassy field centered us as we caught up on the mundane and the remarkable.

We’re all very tactile people and not being able to hug–or just touch each others’ arms during storytelling–was extremely difficult. Several times during the evening we remarked on how painful it is to be physically distanced from our friends and extended family. But sitting by the fire, sharing triumphs and defeats, was more healing than I anticipated. I loved all of it. The company, the night air, the giggles and guffaws, and the smell of the smoke on my sweatshirt when I got into the car to drive home. 

I put on that same sweatshirt at dawn this morning. I zipped it up right before I poured my coffee and climbed into a chair to read a bit with my dog on my lap. I knew the scent wafting off the worn fabric would soothe me. Like so many of us, I need soothing. The West is on fire, massive glaciers threaten to break off from Antarctica, and the planet’s anguish is matched by the angst we feel as we inch closer to the November election. Will it be, finally, a reckoning? Or a ghastly investiture?

But this morning I’ve carved out a little space for hope. Something about the smell of the wood smoke enables me to find a calm that’s been illusive. It reminds me of all the joyful summers I spent at summer camp as a child. It calls up memories of backpacking trips I took with kids when I led trips at Farm and Wilderness. It also triggers a sweet memory of building a campfire out in the snowy yard one February when my little girl wanted me to prove that you could build a fire on top of ice. Whatever’s happening in my olfactory system, I’m grateful for it. The calm is such a gift to me today.

Another gift I received around the fire last night was a diverting story of a young calf. We’d been watching the calf–gauzy white against the deep green of the field–gamboling among the adults of the herd. We remarked on his speed and sprightliness as he frolicked and zoomed through the grass. Soon we were all smiling, and my friend said, “Did I tell you the story of when that calf got separated from his mama?”

She told us that Wonder, the mama, gave birth to this big bull calf down by the brook one day and then wandered to the edge of the upper pasture. A neighbor found the sweet baby calf all alone by the brook shortly after this beauty had come into this world. He and my friend’s partner climbed aboard a big John Deere and headed down to the stream. The rain poured down, and the calf looked so alone and so fragile; they decided to use the bucket of the tractor to deliver the calf to his mama. 

They wrestled the big guy–now dubbed Wonder Boy–into the tractor’s bucket, but worried that the calf might tumble out, the neighbor–not a small man–climbed into the bucket with the newborn. He wrapped his legs around the calf to secure him, and they headed up the pasture’s slope. Jostling and bumping over the uneven field, the neighbor held him tight until they gently deposited him near his mama. As my friend tells it, “She was happy to see him!”

I love the sweetness of this story of Wonder and her Wonder Boy. I’m always delighted when people surprise me by unexpected actions. I’d met the neighbor minutes earlier when he stopped by to chat. At first glance, he didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d climb into a tractor bucket with a newborn calf and protect him during a rather absurd rain-soaked journey. But then, people surprise us all the time, if we allow ourselves to be surprised. If we allow ourselves to see people in their complexities. When we admit to ourselves that we make quick judgments all the time. When we give ourselves permission to accept that we are often wrong about our sorting and our judging. The world is so much more complex than we often imagine.

I will keep this sweatshirt unlaundered for as long as I can; the wood smoke scent is precious to me right now. It reminds me of beauty and surprise and hope. I hope you can find these things today, too.

I wrote the following column in January of 2015. I pulled it out again today because this week Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was tracked by Russian agents and poisoned with the military-grade nerve agent Novichok. Navalny now lies in a Berlin, Germany hospital in a medically-induced coma while he undergoes treatment.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says there’s no doubt that Russia was behind the poisoning: “Time and again, we have seen opposition leaders and critics of the Russian regime attacked, and their lives threatened. Some have even been killed. So this is not just an attack on an individual, but on fundamental democratic rights.”

What was Trump’s response? “We don’t have any proof yet, but I will take a look…It is interesting that everybody’s always mentioning Russia…but I think probably China at this point is a nation that you should be talking about much more so than Russia.”

This is patently absurd. The Soviet Union and Russia developed Novichok between 1971-1993, and it has been used to poison other opponents of the Russian regime in recent years. Our president, once again, is riding with dictators and despots. Why won’t he stand up to Putin? Is it because of his business dealings in and with Russia? Does Putin know something about Trump’s own malfeasance? Does he simply admire the autocrat?

It has been over a month and a half since our own intelligence agencies reported to Trump that Russia was paying bounties to Taliban-linked militants for every American service member killed. Not a peep from the president. Bounties on the heads of our own soldiers, and the Commander in Chief says nothing?

It’s getting harder and harder for GOP members of Congress to ignore the truth of his incompetence and the danger of this incompetence. And yet, they still manage to find the wiggle room. November is coming, folks. Don’t get mad; get organized!

Here’s what I wrote over five years ago about Putin and Navalny:

President Vladimir Putin clearly relished the photo op: he released three Siberian tigers into the wild in May after they’d been nursed back to health. Putin provides the Russian press with ample opportunities to snap shots of him with various wild beasts—or while horseback riding bare-chested—and he thinks carefully about the crafted message. But he still sometimes misses the mark—like the time he donned a puffy jumpsuit and goofy goggles and flew a motorized hang glider in an attempt to aid endangered storks in their migration. They hadn’t gotten the memo and were not compliant. The much-publicized feline feat similarly did not go well. The tigers ran to China.

The cats innately sensed what those living in the Russian taiga know; it is almost impossible to eek out a living there. It’s reputation and formidable conditions render it another character in John Vaillant’s award-winning, gripping narrative, “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.”  Equal parts foreboding, pitiless, and magnificent, it is astonishingly difficult for Russians to survive in Russia’s Far East. And it’s not just the climate, economic conditions, and the presence of wily tigers that make it so challenging; it’s also because of the deep-seated absurdity that shapes the Russian experience.

Maddening state-planned vagaries control Russian lives from afar and offer a vexing backdrop for Vaillant’s tale of the 1996 hunt for a massive Amur tiger (Siberian tiger) after it develops a rapacious taste for human flesh. His story is so unsettling and his account so stark, that my woodstove did nothing to calm my goosebumps while devouring the tale. But the book is also an unlikely love story. The hunters were part of “Inspection Tiger” an anti-poaching brigade formed to stabilize the decimated tiger population in Russia in the face of extensive illegal trafficking of tiger carcasses to China.  

Despite the chronic and crushing absurdity of life, or because of it, humor survives even in the bleakest of spaces. Vaillant weaves Russian jokes throughout his text: Q: What is chaos? A: We do not comment on economic policy. Or Q: Why is our government in no hurry to put men on the moon?  A: What if they refuse to return? According to Vaillant, Russian historian Roy Medvedev uncovered that Stalin had imprisoned about 200,000 people for merely telling political jokes.

Several days before I cracked open “The Tiger”, President Putin reached out his own considerable claws and, through one of his many judicial pawns, handed down a wholly unexpected and equally guile-filled sentence to political prisoner Alexei Navalny. Navalny—arrested on trumped up fraud charges to neutralize his political influence—was found guilty as charged but was given a suspended sentence. It was Navalny’s brother, Oleg, who was sentenced to 3 ½ years in prison. The father of two young children—who has never been part of the opposition movement—will serve as a potent warning to those who would protest in the streets: Stalin’s tactics are still very much a part of Putin’s arsenal.

Independent Moscow-based political analyst Masha Lipman told the Washington Post that the Kremlin’s message was unambiguous: “All of you guys are at our mercy.” Alexei Navalny roared after the verdict, “Aren’t you ashamed of what you’re doing?” It’s clear that conscience is not part of the state-controlled judicial echo chamber.

With declining demand for Russian oil and gas, the ruble in freefall, and Western nations implementing more economic sanctions in retaliation for Putin’s meddling in Ukraine, it’s attractive to hope the Kremlin will finally feel chastened enough to moderate its ambitions. Don’t bet on it.

Wole Soyinka, Nigerian playwright and winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature explains: “A tiger does not shout its tigritude—it acts.”

I’ve found it tough to write lately; in moments I feel both agitated and unfocused. I know anything I write has already been said—many times over—and in tighter, more clever ways. But something’s been haunting me, and I want to try to organize my thoughts and write about them. Even if they fall short of my expectations and standards. Even if they only reach a few souls. Because I’m trying to make sense of this national mess we’re in and help us find a way out.

Here’s the question that’s been popping up in the quieter moments—when I’m driving, when I’m walking in the woods, when I just close my eyes and breathe deeply: How do we reach some of the millions of Americans who’ve completely accepted Trump’s propaganda?

This is not a rhetorical question for me. I mean it most sincerely. I know we can’t hope to reach all of them; some have been completely blinded by the cult of personality that is the Trump brand. And no, I’m not talking about the Trump business enterprise with the family name garishly posted on buildings and products. I’m referring to his presidency itself, which long ago ceased to be about ideas or policy. It’s a classic case of a cult of personality. All the parts are there: relentless propaganda, big lies, government-organized demonstrations, constant flattery and praise from his underlings, stoking feelings of hatred and resentment, giving people permission to feel aggrieved and angry, and providing the public with enemies to blame for all that’s wrong in the nation. 

Needless to say, this is all grotesque. And my revulsion at this twisted cult makes me want to avert my eyes, turn away from the news stories and videos. I want to go inward and self-protect, which is a natural reaction to discomfort and disgust. But as a historian, as a teacher, and as a politician, I do feel a responsibility to keep watching and witnessing. And to share information, instruct, and make connections when I can. And to turn to others who can help guide me in this work.

Let me make something explicit: what we’re seeing now is not new. It is the inevitable outgrowth of a society built on a caste system. This Trumpian moment is (I think) the last ugly gasp of a hierarchy built over hundreds of years in this nation. But this excruciating “moment” may last for years if we don’t see it for what it is: the clash between those who want to finally dismantle our often hidden caste system and those who believe their only hope of maintaining any kind of power is in keeping the caste system intact. Thank you, Isabel Wilkerson, for giving me and thousands of other Americans the incredible gift to the nation that is your latest book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. It’s so damn good. There’s a reason Oprah Winfrey sent 500 copies of the book out to our nation’s governors, mayors, CEOs and college professors. It lays bare the failure of our nation’s ideals—ideals that were written while the caste system was already in place.

I know that so many people will never willingly read a non-fiction book, no matter how emphatically I tell you that you should, so I’ll highlight a few passages from Wilkerson’s book that I hope will stay with you and give us all courage and strength. If we truly start to understand and accept that our caste system based on skin color has been built over hundreds of years, we will not lose heart so quickly when it inevitably takes so many years to dismantle it. Bottom line: The American caste system began in earnest after the arrival of the first Africans to the Virginia colony in 1619.

From Wilkerson’s book: “It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil.” It doesn’t matter how many times I read this sentence; it still shocks me.

Many Americans still see slavery as that “peculiar institution” that was an unfortunate, but short-lived, aspect of our nation’s past. And most have no idea of the political gains made by African-Americans during the period of Reconstruction–or how the racist “Redeemer” movement in the South put the racial caste system firmly back into place through terror, intimidation and the might of the Jim Crow laws.

Wilkerson, again: “The  institution of slavery created a crippling distortion of human relationships where people on one side were made to perform the role of subservience and to sublimate whatever innate talents or intelligence they might have….On the other side, the dominant caste lived under the illusion of an innate superiority over all other groups of humans, told themselves that the people they forced to work for up to eighteen hours, without the pay that anyone had a right to expect, were not, in fact, people, but beasts of the field, childlike creatures, not men, not women, that the performance of servility that had been flogged out of them arose from genuine respect and admiration for their innate glory.”

And then these warped relationships were passed down from generation to generation. And those in the upper caste grew used to their “unearned deference” and came to expect it and demand it. As Wilkerson points out, as they dehumanized others, they dehumanized themselves.

It is this lie—this wicked distortion of human relationships—that we, as a nation, are finally confronting. At least, some of us are. The others, those not ready to confront the lie, are the ones who are grateful for Trump’s message. He’s buying them a bit more time to live in the sick enchantment of the lie. He’s giving permission for their sense of aggrievement. He’s blatantly harkening back to a time when the caste lines were clearer. A time when a Black man couldn’t be president; a time when a woman of Indian and Jamaican descent could not be a candidate for Vice President.

His propaganda is comforting to those who don’t truly understand our nation’s fraught history, and it bolsters those who are deeply afraid (sometimes unconsciously) of losing their power, their station. But sharing power does not mean a loss of power. Inviting more people into places of power means that as a nation we might finally be able to fulfill the noble, but so far unrealized, ideals of equality and justice.

So, back to where I started. How do we reach some of the millions of Americans who’ve completely accepted Trump’s propaganda? I don’t know for certain, but I do feel a little closer to the answer after reading Wilkerson’s magnificent book. We must all start to make America’s invisible caste system more obvious, and we must honestly name the ways in which this tight system of control keeps us all smaller and more fearful. It’s a terrible way to live.