Hey, America.

I get it: this feels like it’s never going to end, like this oppressive darkness will never lift, like the disorienting chaos of these days is now our default setting.

This is understandable.

For the last decade, we’ve been living in dog years, friends; pummeled by a century’s worth of Constitutional crises, systemic failures, war crimes, and human moral collapses.

The atrocities have accumulated, the legislative losses have piled up, and perhaps, most of all, the list of people we loved and once respected who’ve abandoned compassion and reason has grown beyond what we can fathom.

To put it another way: we’ve been knocked on our asses for ten straight years, and that’s gonna leave a mark on our nation, on our relationships, and on our psyches.

We are collectively experiencing the PTSD of a prolonged daily existence that our nervous systems were never designed to sustain. That kind of unceasing emotional trauma has rendered all of us deprived of hope, physically exhausted, and a hair’s breadth from a breakdown.

In light of all of this, we can be forgiven for believing that we’re never getting out of this, that our Republic is cooked, that 250 years will end up being the lifespan of our flawed but once-promising experiment in liberty.

But we’d be wrong.

Our present condition is not permanent, America. One way or another, a shift is coming.

He is not long for this earth, and he is not long for the presidency.

One day, soon, either nature or the Constitution is going to take him, and when it does, there will be rejoicing throughout this planet that we have not seen in 80 years. Humanity will feel the cathartic jubilation it should feel when tyrants meet their demise, and whether he ends first in the ground or in a cell, we all need to make sure we’re here to celebrate together.

We cannot be so overwhelmed by the recent sorrows and current threats that we slip into apathy and resignation; that we allow ourselves to be gaslighted into believing our presence counts for nothing, that our work is fruitless, that our efforts are wasted.

We need to remember that the toll of proximity and the lies of the present can distort reality.

We’re here right now, on the bloodied and broken ground with our faces pressed into the jagged, unrelenting horrors on our timelines and in our neighborhoods. Presently, it’s impossible to rise to 30,000 feet and see that our current struggles, though formidable, are not unprecedented. Humanity has always persevered beyond the evil visited upon it.

If we lean on History, she will remind us that all violent regimes crumble, all malevolent movements dissolve, and all tyrants fall, and this will be true for this nation and the monstrosity in front of us. Our job as decent human beings is to allow our individual and collective presence to hasten the arrival of such times.

It may feel illogical, but we are closer to ending this nightmare than we imagine.

As quickly as it arrived, it can be driven out if, instead of throwing our hands up and accepting our shared fate in these moments, we transform all the despair and the anger we’ve amassed into a fierce and unrelenting resistance.

But that is the caveat here: we cannot wish this hatred away, and we cannot do nothing and hope it extinguishes itself. Violent, power-mad, parasitic people never voluntarily abdicate power once they have it; courageous, compassionate humanity has always needed to work together to take it from them.

We can be that beautiful plot-twisting presence right now.

And no, the ugliness his ascension has unearthed in our neighbors, the unthinkable damage he has done to our systems, and the cruelty he has authored will not magically disappear with his death or imprisonment, but there will be a massive gap left.

The terrible status quo will be interrupted.

Through the polls or through protest, instability will come to this seemingly unstoppable behemoth.

As they always do, time and effort will ensure that what is right now will not always be.

Friends, our calling as empathetic humans, good citizens of this nation, and caretakers of the planet, through sustained effort, personal sacrifice, and steadfast, focused fury, is to make sure that the nation we become will be greater than the nation we are, and far sooner than if we had never been here.

Take heart, America, we will outlive him.

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