Ligaments cushion joints, tendons connect muscles to bones. Our skeletons keep us upright. Together, they give us movement, strength and flexibility.
If they are torn asunder by accident or by torment, we come to a halt and sometimes collapse until, if we are lucky, surgery can repair the damage. In other words, we come apart at our seams.
Every day seems to deliver more examples of the connective tissues of this nation being deliberately ripped apart by the actions of the Trump administration – its daily dehumanization of brown and black people, ICE gestapo showing up outside a Governor Newsom press conference, Texas undermining representational democracy by extreme Gerrymandering in an attempt to fix the 2026 midterm elections, Robert Kennedy trying to destroy vaccines, the attempt to scramble accurate economic information by setting up a system to lie about monthly job reports.
What surgeon will be able to repair the cumulative damage of four years of this assault on the body politic?
I do not know what comes tomorrow, next week, in 14 months, in 3 and ½ years, except that we as a country will be cripples, perhaps blind, probably impoverished, lurching along, half-mad, muttering, wondering how all of this happened to a place that once thought of itself as exceptional, as a “shining city on a hill.”
