American Sacrifice

“Events this past week have thrust our institutions and ideals into challenging times. It will take hard work to not only truthfully accept the logic of what just happened but also to grasp the scale and depth of harm that has been inflicted on our democratic faith,” says Dr. Aishwary Kumar. “That this has been done through a willful, punitive choice made by a complex majority of Americans does not make our task easier.”

Significant damage on memory, on history, and on literacy will be unleashed and more price extracted on public and political education in the next few years, making a return to common sense and a shared vocabulary of norms even more difficult. “We must respond to this as we must, probing why our social contract has failed to hold and how profoundly we have misunderstood the arc of American citizenship itself (not to mention, underestimated our…