What We Inherit, What We Must Break

They say it takes a few generations to build something sacred, but only a season to burn it down. We are living in the season of fire.

Five months. That’s all it’s taken. Five months for this administration to gut protections, embolden white nationalism, vilify queerness with the precision of a Sunday sermon gone sour, and turn the machinery of empire inward with a sharpened grin. Five months, and already the ground beneath our feet feels unfamiliar, like we are walking on the memory of “democracy” rather than the thing itself.

And yet, it will take years, decades even for a truly progressive administration, if it should ever come, to undo this violence. Because the damage done is not just policy. It is not only in what is written into law but what has been whispered into the nation's psyche. It is the moral disfigurement, the normalization of cruelty, the brazen rewriting of who is human and who is expendable.

James Baldwin once wrote that “people who imagine themselves as white do so at great cost—not only to those they oppress but to their own capacity for love.” That cost is now calcified into law, into budgets, into border walls and book bans. The soul of this country has been traded in for slogans and surveillance.

To heal this, if healing is even the right word requires more than elections. It demands a radical remembering, a reckoning and a refusal to go numb.

Progress will not be a return to the polite violence of neoliberalism dressed up as civility. It cannot be. Because even the best of administrations will be forced to navigate within systems designed for erasure. And every step forward will be shadowed by the weight of these five months, and the five centuries that came before.

We must name this moment not as anomaly but as prophecy fulfilled. And still, we fight not for nostalgia, but for the world we have yet to see.

A radically progressive future, if it is to come, will need to be unruly, uncompromising; built through a coalition of of the unseen and those who are targeted. It will take longer than we wish, but the slowness does not mean we stop. It means we plant with deeper roots.

Because even in fire, seeds survive.