We Will Be Remembered, In Spite of Ourselves

“I don't know how to explain to you why you should care about other people.” – Lauren Morrill, January 2017

Most of us have that read that quote somewhere along the way. It’s such an obvious statement of truth that it feels as though it should have always existed, but it didn’t. The fact that the presidency of Donald Trump was the first time in American history that such a thought demanded to be put into words ought to tell us something about ourselves, and about the man we chose to serve us.

Nobody would ever admit that they only care about themselves, of course, not even to themselves. Nobody wants to think of themself as heartless, cruel, selfish. Nobody wants to believe that they are the bad guy in the story. Which is why people will tell you they’re voting the way they are because of “the price of eggs,” or “coal miners” (as in the 2016 election). They will tell you they’re “protecting girls” when they’re doing nothing of the sort. They will tell you it’s the economy, stupid, even when the economy is actually doing pretty well. They will tell you whatever lie they tell themselves because to admit the truth would be to admit that they really don’t care, do U?

What’s different this time around versus the Burger King’s first reign is that they’re no longer even pretending. Life-saving food for 300,000 critically malnourished children is being held in a Georgia warehouse. The reason? Saving these children is “not in the national interest.” What’s different this time is the “ASMR video” produced by the White House which showed shackled immigrants being deported aboard stark military planes. What’s different is the carelessness with which Elon Musk’s DOGE incels are destroying people’s lives as easily, and gleefully, as if they were pulling wings off flies. What’s different are attention-starved Republican backbenchers and state office holders tripping over themselves to demonstrate their callousness towards immigrants, trans people, gays, brown and black people, and women. What’s different now are the shrugs from too many Democrats and too many in the media. What’s different is that Trump and the bootlickers in his orbit have shifted the Overton Window so far that we’re all in danger of being thrown, Putin-like, right out.

Americans have lived through tough times before. We are, after all, a nation in almost perpetual war. Our causes have sometimes been just and sometimes not. Americans have suffered through incompetent leadership. We’ve suffered fools and miscreants and peddlers of lies told for no reason beyond the personal ambition of those who would tell them. We’ve endured the hubris of a president lying us into a Middle Eastern war which broke the world. Never, though, have we faced an American administration whose chief aim appears to be the dismantlement of American democracy, which their party’s founding father, Abraham Lincoln once referred to as “The last, best hope of Earth.”

I don’t know how to explain to you why you should care about other people. I wish I did. I wish that what is self-evident to me – that our purpose on this earth is to love and to be loved – was self-evident to those who find virtue in viciousness. How odd that so many of these same people subscribe to a religion I do not which preaches the same sentiment I hold to be true, and which they do not.

In that same 1862 speech to Congress, given during this nation’s Civil War, Lincoln wrote, “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare or another of us.”

155 years before Lauren Morrill put down her thought, Abraham Lincoln provided the answer. We are all inextricably bound to each other, the significant and insignificant. As Lincoln wrote, we cannot escape history. And while most of us will not be remembered; what we do as individuals will be lost. What we do collectively, as a nation, will remain. What do we today will determine who we are tomorrow.

I don’t know how to explain to why should care about other people. I don’t know how to explain to you why the least among us is more important than the greatest. I don’t know how to explain that We, the People is more important than I, the Person. I don’t know how to explain anything anymore because I don’t understand how we lost ourselves so completely.