We Went To Sleep

How Did This Happen?

I want you to picture a child you love. Maybe it’s your daughter, the one who still believes you can fix anything. Maybe it’s your grandson, who fell asleep on your chest last week and trusted the whole world because he trusts you. Hold that face in your mind right now, because someday that child is going to look up at you and ask a question you are not ready for. They are going to ask what you did. They are going to ask where you were when the country came apart. And you are going to have to tell them the truth.

So let me ask you the same question now, while there is still time to change your answer. Where were you when it happened? How does a nation that clawed its way through a civil war, dragged itself out of the Great Depression, stormed the beaches of Normandy, and marched across a bridge in Selma with its head held high end up surrendering everything to one small, frightened, angry old man? You watched it happen. I watched it happen. And the answer to how we let it is the hardest thing I have ever had to say out loud.

We went to sleep.

The Country That Was Always Becoming

Let me tell you about the America I was raised to believe in, because I need you to understand what we are losing before I tell you how we lost it.

My America was never perfect. It was born with a wound at its center, men writing the most beautiful words ever put to paper about liberty and equality while human beings were bought and sold a short walk from where they signed. That contradiction lived in the founding documents like a splinter under the skin. The thing that made this place worth loving was never the pretense that we had it figured out. The thing that made this place worth loving was that we kept reaching. We kept becoming.

I think about the women who chained themselves to fences and went to jail and were force fed in prison cells so that one day a grandmother could walk into a polling place and cast a vote without asking permission from any man. I think about the workers who organized when organizing could get you beaten or killed, who fought for the weekend you take for granted, for the eight hour day, for the simple dignity of coming home to your family with your body still intact. I think about children, actual children, who stood in the streets of Birmingham in 1963 and let police dogs lunge at them and fire hoses knock them flat against brick walls, because they understood something we forgot. They understood that the promise of this country is not a gift. It is a fight. Every inch of progress was paid for by somebody who refused to go to sleep.

That is what you inherited. That is the thing handed to you by people who suffered for it and bled for it and in some cases died for it. They handed it to you still warm, still unfinished, still moving toward that perfect ideal it has never quite reached and always, always kept reaching for. They trusted you to carry it forward the way they carried it.

And we set it down. We got comfortable. We assumed the floor would hold.

We went to sleep.

How A Lifetime Of Work Burns In A Single Season

Here is the thing nobody wants to sit with at the dinner table, the thing that turns my stomach when I let myself feel the full weight of it.

The good things took two hundred years to build. They were assembled brick by brick by generations of people who never saw the finished work and built it anyway. And it took one term, actually just 16 months, to take a sledgehammer to all of it.

The independence of the people sworn to enforce our laws, gone, replaced by loyalty tests where the only qualification that matters is whether you will kneel. The quiet, unglamorous trust that an election means something, that your vote counts the same as a billionaire’s, eroded by a thousand lies repeated until people stopped being able to tell up from down. The oldest and most sacred agreement in the American experiment, that no man stands above the law, that not even a king and certainly not a president gets to rewrite the rules to protect himself, treated like a joke, like a quaint old custom from a more naive time.

He came in on the first day and started tearing. He went after the judges who dared to rule against him, branding them enemies, calling for their removal, teaching a whole country that the courts are obstacles to be smashed rather than guardrails that protect us all. He turned the machinery of justice into a weapon to be aimed at whoever displeased him that morning.

He abandoned the friends who stood beside us through every war and every crisis, and he draped his arm around the dictators and the strongmen, the men who jail their critics and disappear their journalists, and he called them his kind of people. He took an economy and turned it into a rigged table in a back room where the house always belongs to him and his friends, while you watched your grocery bill climb and your savings shrink and wondered why working harder kept leaving you further behind.

And the cruelty. The cruelty was never an accident. The cruelty was the point. The families torn apart, the desperate people treated like vermin, the sick and the poor and the old told that their suffering was a sign of someone else’s strength. They did it in the open. They did it on camera. They dared us to do something about it.

We saw it. You saw it. I saw it. Every single one of us saw the cues.

And we went to sleep.

The Story We Told Ourselves So We Could Keep Sleeping

I have spent a long time asking myself how. How could a free people, the most powerful and educated and connected people in the history of the world, watch this unfold and do so little to stop it? I have an answer now, and it does not let any of us off the hook, myself included.

We drank the Kool-Aid. Not the obvious kind, not the kind the true believers swallowed. We drank a quieter, more comfortable poison. We told ourselves a bedtime story, and the story went like this. The institutions are too strong to break. The adults in the room will hold the line. The system has survived worse. Someone smarter and braver and better positioned than me will surely handle it. This could never really happen here, not in America, not to us.

That story was a pillow. We pulled it over our faces and we breathed in the lie and it felt so much better than the truth.

Because the truth had a cost. The truth meant you had to register, and most of us did not. The truth meant you had to vote in the elections nobody talks about, the school board race and the county clerk and the judge whose name you never recognized on the ballot, and most of us skipped right past them. The truth meant you had to read past the headline, make the uncomfortable phone call, knock on the stranger’s door, sit across from your own brother at Thanksgiving and risk the fight instead of passing the potatoes and changing the subject. The truth meant work, and we were so tired, and the couch was so soft, and the feed kept scrolling, and there was always one more reason to deal with it tomorrow.

We disregarded the cues because seeing them clearly would have demanded something of us. So we squinted. We looked away. We let the noise of our own lives drown out the sound of the alarm.

We went to sleep.

What Happens In The Dark While Good People Rest

Let me tell you how a dictatorship of small men actually arrives, because the movies got it wrong and the myth is killing us.

It does not come with tanks rolling down Main Street. There is no single dramatic morning when the sirens wail and everyone suddenly knows. That is the fantasy that keeps us comfortable, because as long as we are waiting for the tanks, we get to tell ourselves it has not happened yet.

The real thing is quieter, and so much more dangerous for being quiet. It comes one norm at a time. One law ignored. One judge defied. One lie that goes unpunished and so becomes permission for the next, bigger lie. One loyal servant of the public swapped out for one loyal servant of the man. It comes in increments small enough that each one alone feels survivable, feels not quite worth the fight, feels like something you can let slide just this once. And it moves fast, faster than anyone believes possible, precisely because the people who could have stopped it at the door were dozing in the next room, certain that someone would wake them if it ever really mattered.

That is how quickly your world can be taken from you. Not in a war. In a nap. While you rested, trusting that the house would still be standing when you woke.

The Alarm Is Screaming And You Are Sitting Up In Bed

But you are awake now. I can feel it, because if you have read this far, something in you is wide awake and refusing to lie back down. That feeling in your chest right now, that hot tangle of fear and grief and pure white fury, I need you to understand that it is not a weakness. It is the most valuable thing you own. It is the thing the small men are most afraid of. So do not waste it on despair, and do not let anyone convince you that the only honest response to this moment is to give up.

I will not lie to you about the road ahead. Repairing this will take years. It may take decades. Some of the damage is the kind that does not heal in our lifetime, and the people already paying the price for it deserve our honesty about that, not our false comfort. This is real. This is as serious as anything our country has ever faced.

And this country has come back from the edge every single time it has stood there. Every time. Not because of luck, and not because the system saved itself, but because somewhere in the dark a critical mass of ordinary people, people exactly like you, decided to stay awake and do the unglamorous work of saving it. The marchers. The organizers. The neighbors who knocked on doors. The teachers who told the truth. The mothers and fathers who looked at their children and decided those kids deserved a country worth inheriting.

That is the whole of American history in one sentence. We fall asleep, and we pay for it, and then we wake up, and we get to work, and we drag this stubborn, beautiful, unfinished country one more inch toward the ideal it has never stopped reaching for.

So stay awake. I am begging you. Register today, not tomorrow. Vote in every single election, the loud ones and the quiet ones and the ones you have never heard of, because the quiet ones are exactly where they are counting on your absence. Show up. Make the call. Knock on the door. Have the hard conversation with the people you love, the one that scares you, the one you have been avoiding. Tell your kids and your grandkids the truth about this moment while you still can. Tell them we slept. Tell them we paid for it. And then, God willing, tell them we got up.

Because that is the answer I want to give that child or grandchild someday, the one whose face you are still holding in your mind. When they look up at me and ask what I did, I want to be able to look back at them and say I woke up in time. I want you to be able to say it too.

We went to sleep once.

We are not going back to bed.

Share this with someone you love. Then get up, and let’s go to work.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

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