We Will Find Each Other Again
I am writing this as an American who is ashamed.
Not ashamed of America — not of its founding ideals, not of its people, not of the long and painful and still-unfinished work of making those ideals real. I am ashamed that we have, for this moment, lost control of the machinery we built to protect those ideals, and that the wreckage is falling on people who never asked to be in the blast radius. People in other nations. People in this one.
So I want to say something plainly, and I want to say it to anyone in the world who is watching.
We see you watching. And we know what it looks like from where you’re standing.
There is a thing the internet did — quietly, imperfectly, with as many poisons as gifts — that I don’t think we’ve fully reckoned with. It made it harder to hate strangers. Not impossible. Not even improbable, given the right algorithm and the right demagogue. But structurally harder. Because you can now watch a Turkish family celebrate a wedding, and a Kenyan engineer explain a theorem, and a Brazilian grandmother cook something that makes you hungry, and the abstraction that lets you turn a nation into an enemy becomes just slightly more difficult to maintain. The human face keeps breaking through.
This is why I believe the democratic world will hang together. Not because institutions are strong — many of them are bending badly right now. Not because leaders are wise — the evidence on that is, at best, mixed. But because ordinary people, in extraordinary numbers, have spent twenty years accidentally getting to know each other. And most of what they’ve learned is that the person on the other side of the screen mostly wants what they want: some safety, some dignity, a chance to make something, someone to love, a world their children can live in.
Most people in most nations understand, right now, that most American citizens would stop this if they could. The gap between a government and its people is not a new problem in human history. The world has seen it before. The world knows the difference between a country and its captors.
Here is my diagnosis, and I offer it not as an excuse but as a map:
Grievance is what brought us to this brink.
Not policy disagreement. Not ideological difference. Not even legitimate anger at legitimate injustice — that anger has its place, and its place is in the arena, not the street, and certainly not the gun. I mean the cultivation of grievance as a political identity. The transformation of resentment into a worldview. The story that says: you have been robbed, and someone must pay, and the paying is more important than the building.
That story is as old as demagoguery. It is the original political malware. And it is, in the end, self-consuming — because it can never be satisfied. There is no amount of punishment that closes the wound, because the wound was never really the point. The point was the feeling. The feeling of finally being heard, even if what you’re being heard saying is a lie, even if the person listening to you has absolutely no intention of making your life better and every intention of making it worse.
Grievance is also what will be the end of us, if we let it be. Not just American grievance. All of it. The settling of old scores at civilizational scale. The decision to let what was done to us in the past determine what we do to each other in the future, forever, until there is no future left to ruin.
I have no grievance with any person or any nation who wants to extend their hand in friendship on the simple, generous idea that we can all be friends.
That sentence sounds naive. I am aware of how it sounds. I am choosing to say it anyway, because I think the sophistication that sneers at it — the geopolitical realism, the zero-sum calculus, the knowing smirk at anyone who still believes in common cause — has had its turn, and look at what it built.
What I’m proposing isn’t the absence of conflict. Conflict is not the enemy. Difference is not the enemy. The fiery debate is not the enemy — the fiery debate is the point. Democracy is not the promise of agreement. It is the promise of a fair fight, conducted with words instead of weapons, resolved by counting heads instead of breaking them, and accepted by the losers with the knowledge that their turn will come again.
Everyone gets a turn. That is the whole idea. That is dignity, operationalized.
And the riches of this good Earth — and they are extraordinary, even now, even after everything we’ve done to them — those are not a fixed prize to be hoarded by whoever got there first and is willing to be brutal enough to stay. They are a shared inheritance. From people who built things. From a planet that, for reasons we still don’t fully understand, decided to make life possible and even beautiful. We didn’t earn that. We received it. And we will have to answer for what we did with it.
Our children are going to live here.
I keep coming back to that. All the abstraction collapses into that.
Whatever political theory you hold, whatever civilization you think is ascendant or declining, whatever score you think still needs settling — your children are going to live here. In the house we are either building or burning. And they are going to look back at this moment and ask what we chose.
I want to be able to say that some of us chose friendship. That some of us looked across every border and every difference and said: I see you. I am sorry for what my government has done. And I believe we can still build something worth living in.
That is not naivety. That is the hardest possible position to hold right now.
I’m trying to hold it.
Thank you very much for this graceful and hopeful essay. I'm bookmaking it to read again when I wake up in the middle of the night worried for my country and for people everywhere who are prey to the politics of resentment and grievance.
95 percent of us would probably agree on most things if we started from the same set of facts. If we are willing to face some hard truths we can actually do that.