MY SON HAS ECLIPSED ME

While I was brooding about what to say today, my son Tobias posted this brief essay on his Facebook page.  It is well worth reading. Tobias, by the way, is the Jefferson Barnes Fordham Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania.

A Note to the World:

When this atrocity of an administration began nearly four years ago, we asked for your forbearance as we tried to do the work necessary to restore decency and the rule of law to the Executive Branch of our national government and rejoin the community of responsible nations. We know, we said, and we are sorry. Give us time and we will do the work to fix this aberration. But the truth is that this monster who has occupied the West Wing of the White House these last four years is not an aberration, even if his particular combination of personality disorders and moral emptiness is singular. This happened because of long-unaddressed pathologies in the American spirit.

It happened because we did not complete the work of Reconstruction following the close of hostilities in the Civil War, betraying the Black men and women who had built the economy of the United States while being subjected to forced labor, torture, rape and murder in favor of some long-forgotten petty political gain of the moment.

It happened because the soul of America has been riven by the brutality of White Supremacy since its founding, defined first by the abomination of chattel slavery, then the domestic terrorism of lynching and violent apartheid, then by the euphemized racism of disenfranchisement, voter suppression and mass incarceration, always with the evil bargain that masses of White Americans could be exploited and abandoned so long as they were offered a hollow promise of centrality in the definition of American identity.

It happened because some of our most celebrated political leaders took the script of the racial other and turned it against Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Muslim Americans, Mexican Americans, Guatemalan and Nicaraguan and El Salvadorian Americans, each in their turn when the script became convenient, and we have venerated those leaders while treating their assaults on our non-White brothers and sisters as footnotes to be mentioned only in passing.

It happened because we have allowed a media culture that glorifies sociopaths, obsesses over narcissists and normalizes anti-Semitism to predominate in the public square and mock the values of integrity, earnestness, care and compassion that are the foundation of any just society.

It happened because our system of government still wears the structural skeleton of the abomination of slavery and the unabating betrayal of Native American nations and peoples, allowing a relentless minority to shut the majority out of the political process.

It happened because of our two and a half century failure to carve the beating heart of White Supremacy out of our system of government and our collective spirit. That infrastructure of injustice is what made it possible for this most atrocious of men -- this pathetic, dysfunctional, emotionally arrested, corrupt, serially predatory fraud -- to occupy the most powerful position of governmental authority in the world.

And so, for the last four years, we have organized and donated, protested and inspired, contributed our skills, searched our souls, and put forward a united effort to make clear that this bonfire of hate and corruption and toxic infantilism would not stand. We asked you to believe that we would do that work. And we have. The madman will exit this office in ignominy after one term and a decent, serious man and a powerful, joy-filled woman will start the work of governing and engaging with the world once again.

But this victory is not the end. It is barely even a beginning. The deep pathologies remain, given more power and reach for having been brought to the surface and embraced by the nominal head of our government.

So it is time for a new commitment. It is time for the American people to embrace the long-overdue task of creating a just society. Not merely a society that congratulates itself for making loud and sanctimonious commitments to justice, but a truly just society in which two hundred and fifty years of moral compromise are confronted and repudiated. It is time that we reckon with the generations of moral failure that made the last four years possible and require of ourselves that we address those failures.

The world should hold us accountable for the last four years. And we, in turn, should demand nothing less of ourselves than a commitment to transformational justice that will make the ideals we claim to hold a reality.

The great work begins.