There’s an old “Twilight Zone” episode where Rod Serling tried to come up with a metaphor for all the anger in America in the early’60’s. Life in those days wasn’t actually bucolic until 1968. The metaphor he lands on is darkness: unchanging, unrelenting, moonless and starless night that never allows the dawn. Towards the end of the story one character explains the dark is all the hate in the country vomited back out because it could no longer be containedm that this is something we did to ourselves, and now we have to live with it.This movement is not anarchy. It could push America to be a better nation. A WaPo editorial @PostOpinions https://t.co/jlhLA5UPHG— Fred Hiatt (@hiattf) June 6, 2020
It occurs to me that, however weak the metaphor was in the original, it's a powerful metaphor for what's happening. We, the country, all of us, in big cities and small towns, have had all of Donald Trump’s racism and divisiveness and hatred of the “other “ we can stand, and we’re vomiting it back up. But it's not bringing darkness, it's bringing light. This is a nationwide, culture wide, rejection of racism, a profound one, but it’s also a rejection of the national fountainhead of that racism. It’s a rejection of injustice, of state sponsored violence, of divisions into "us" and "them." It is a reaction so large and so deep and so real I’m not sure it will even show up in polls and numbers and answers to questions. But We the People are done with Trump and all he stands for, and this is the fever the right and the good and the true that drives him from the body politic. This is the purgative that forces him out, him and all his works. This is the day, a long day, a day that may take months, that we say we are better than this, and we start to be.
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