It’s morning here in America, and for many white people who fancied themselves as “woke,” it’s been a rude awakening.

A lot happened while we were sleeping.

Our prolonged repose actually began in November of 2008.

Back then, we basked in the warm glow of what seemed like the dawn’s long-delayed arrival. Reveling in the once unthinkable reality of a black President, we all grew comfortable, nestling into a seductive complacency that only the blind spots of privilege and ignorance provide.

The unfettered joy of that moment became a slow-acting emotional sedative that slowly squeezed the urgency from us, gradually dulling our senses and clouding our judgment. Day by day, naive jubilation numbed us into believing we may have finally arrived together at Martin’s glorious mountaintop, that the arc of the moral universe had bent permanently toward justice. If we had taken the time to ask black and brown people, they’d have warned us not to fall asleep, but we didn’t.

Instead, we believed that the aspirational “we shall overcomes” that rang out over decades had become a fixed and unchangeable present. We exhaled too deeply; collectively, settling into that cozy space where the heart rate slows, and the limbs and eyelids grow heavy; where, without realizing it, slumber suddenly overtakes you: one blink awake, the next blink asleep.

And for the next eight years, we sleepwalked through the world, physically here but not fully present, not entirely lucid, not truly seeing; caught between the actual and the unreal worlds, between the real nightmare and the imagined dream. Yes, we still planned and marched and campaigned and worked, but we did so slightly sedated in the haze of bad stories, willful ignorance, and wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, the bigots were the ones who really woke up.

Shaken violently from their sleep in November 2008 by the reality of what decades of irrational fear, inherited racism, and perverted theology taught them was the absolute worst place they could find themselves, they began to mount a fierce counterattack.

They created news outlets and social media platforms designed to filter out everything except that which would fully trigger terror within the hearts of their intended targets and would-be allies:fantastical stories of a pervasive and coordinated Gay Agenda coming to convert their children;of violent, heavily armed, brown-skinned drug gangs overrunning our borders;of godless, abortion-mad progressives having indiscriminate sex without concern or care;of Muslim terrorist hordes infiltrating our neighborhoods and bodegas;of America-hating Democrats coming for their jobs and flags and prayers and guns.

And we were still sleeping.

They played the long game of local political wins, incrementally gaining footholds in the spaces where legislatures are commandeered, supermajorities are formed, districts are redrawn, courts are polluted, and democracy is slowly suffocated.

And on we slept.

The bigots leveraged thousands of Christian pulpits, where every seven days they’d wildly stoke the fires of people’s phobias and fears, weaponize the Scriptures against queer people and migrants and Muslims, and pervert the expansive Gospel of Jesus into a gated white community of rabid nationalism. Sermon by sermon, the opportunistic pulpit predators enlisted them all into service as passionate soldiers in the Army of the straight, white, American, male Lord.

And we kept on sleeping.

And then, in 2016, to inculcate the terror fully, they propped up an amoral sideshow carnival barker as their chosen one; a barren, narcissistic, empty husk of a man with no discernible moral convictions of his own. They recognized they could use this breathing void as a flesh-and-blood avatar to embody their grievances and perpetuate their phobias.

The bigots erected a vile, blustery false idol of greatness and whiteness around which their easily-manipulated rank and file would fall prostrate; a shameless grifter who would daily dig into the putrid muck to find an ever-deepening moral bottom. In the sleep-induced state we were in we thought it was a joke at first. We laughed ourselves back into a dreamworld where everything would be fine and where decency would prevail and where the system would work; so much so that one hundred million of us slept all the way through an election cycle.

You’d have thought that would be our ultimate wake-up call.

Yet, somehow, over the next decade, despite horrors and abominations never visited upon America, though we imagined ourselves rightly woke, we still could not coalesce and leverage our voices and our influence enough to avoid our nation making this grievous, likely fatal error a second time.

And here we are perilously close to theocracy, a hair’s breadth from authoritarianism, within inches of our Republic’s collapse, and still, I wonder if we’re fully awake now.

I wonder if we’re ready to cast off the cobwebs of our complacency and enter fully into the bloody fray in front of us.

I wonder if we’re willing to rouse ourselves into lucidity and step into the jagged trenches of the fight of our lives and for the disparate swath of humanity that we’ve let down.

I wonder if we’re prepared to face our culpability and admit our failures and make amends with our time and our resources and our votes.

I wonder if we have the intestinal fortitude to face what is ahead and what it will require from us.

Or maybe we’ll just find another way to anesthetize; distracting ourselves with retail therapy and mindless scrolling, soothing ourselves with false hope, sedating our systems with American exceptionalism. Will we somehow find a way to again retreat into the comfortable places and once more grow so tired that we’ll nestle back into a deadly slumber?

I wonder if there’s still time to undo the present nightmare.

The only way we’ll have a chance to know is if we wake up and stay awake.

It’s morning in America.

There’s mourning in America.

Time to rise and shine.

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