Rage

“Any jackass can kick over a barn. It takes a carpenter to build one.”

What we are watching in the United States today is not politics at work. It is not a disagreement over policy. It is the deliberate, gleeful demolition of a beautiful cathedral. A church assembled stone by stone over two and a half centuries by expert craftsmen who believed that their work mattered. Madison's architecture. Washington’s foundation. Lincoln's preservation. Johnson's Great Society. Reagan’s shining city on a hill. That soaring, earnest conviction that America could be a place where no child went hungry, no elder died in poverty, and no neighbor was crushed beneath the boot of indifference.

Lyndon Johnson knew what was at stake. "We have the power to shape the civilization that we want," he said. "But we need your will, your labor, your hearts."

He was right. And those who came after him kept building. The craftsmen weren’t always perfect, but they were constructing something beautiful for all of us to admire with pride.

Then came the jackasses.

The rage I feel watching this administration is not abstract. It is specific. I have watched them murder citizens, distort our values, grant the president blanket immunity from tax crimes, and run up trillions in debt that will burden our grandchildren. They lie, cheat, and grift. They go to war without forethought while systematically burning the alliances that took generations to build. The America I love has been a beacon to the world. Today, it is in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous administration.

The Declaration of Independence, that other cathedral document, was direct about such moments: “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

They weren't subtle about it. Neither should we.

What enrages me most is not the men doing the kicking. Jackasses exist in every era. It is the millions who watch them destroy something beautiful and call it strength. It will take more than fifty years to repair what has been broken in 18 months. That is a cost measured not just in dollars, but in lives, in dignity, and in the squandered futures of my children.

Thomas Paine understood the essential fragility of an authoritarian state. He said, “The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of the resistance.”

I will continue to resist and rage against the jackasses and their quiet, gutless enablers. I know that my fellow patriots will fight alongside me and make the cowards pay a price.

The cathedral is damaged. Some stones may never be recovered. But the craftsmen are still among us in classrooms and courtrooms and community halls, in the stubborn, unglamorous work of citizenship. The jackasses will tire. They always do.

And then we build.