If and when this national lunacy ends, we can’t get a broom, sweep it into a box, and then pronounce ourselves whole again. We are a nation of the 3/5s, of the Epstein files, and of letting our rights slip away in the name of security and cultish loyalty to a man whose entire life contradicts who we say we are.

Some of us will retain our squinted eyes as we look at the people around us. We’ll try to make sense of the fact they endorsed basic violations of our Constitution and hurting people, all under the guise of protecting our borders. Borders lose significance when you degrade the people inside of them.

Though it’s not my story to tell, I will be the speaker for the dead and the oracle of things that require reckoning.

Children are sponges. Despite their lack of understanding, they absorb what’s around them. Whether it be kindness and love or fists and anger. How some children grow up without releasing the toxicity is a question that never leaves my mind.

The United States has a problem. Yesterday, upon hearing about the death of his beloved great grandmother, a boy asked his mom if the “evil police” had taken her. Just two little words, both packed with backstory, accusation, and a comprehension beyond his years.

It’s not that the boy had been soaked in specifics or propaganda. He takes in what’s around him.

Just a boy, already trying to grapple with loss, echoing and powerfully saying what a lot of us are feeling.

If you’re in favor of all the nonsense going on, it would be easy for you to discount a little boys concise concern. But it is often the voiceless, the naive, and the ones who are powerless who provide the strongest condemnation.

Though you may not recognize the validity of his reality, he and countless other people in the United States and around the world now possess a primal fear and recognition of what we’re capable of. How many generations will it take to dispel?

And maybe we never will at all. This is the new us and those of us who are horrified will become silent. The justifiers and idolaters of power and money will get their way.

I hope the little boy finds reprieve from his thoughts of the “evil police.” And that he’ll take this formative observation and be one of the people who works to keep it from being duplicated. We can’t blame him if he grows up to be mentally looking over his shoulder at the shadow of what we’ve become.

We’ve managed to take a little boy’s grief and amplify it with the immediate thought that our government may have had something to do with it.

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