We are not going back

I have absolutely no regrets.

This time, I fully knew what my country was capable of, and I did everything I could to work toward a better outcome.

If the majority of my country is OK with an America-attacking, vulgar racist, whose only true talent is the ability to somehow always go lower, I find it terribly, terribly sad and wildly dangerous.

This does not make me a better or worse person than anyone else, it just makes me, me, and I am very proud and comfortable with that. And if you stood for what is good ... and right … and decent, you should be plenty proud of yourselves, too.

I don’t expect this to take the sting and the terror away, but I am typing that if you can’t live with yourself and your choices, then you are on a horrible journey with no good end.

I am very proud and comfortable with the people I align myself with these days, and if that is an ever-shrinking circle, I take heart and surround myself with their love, strength, and wisdom.

I know where I stand in life, after having survived many falls, and have the scars to prove it. I am proud of where I have landed, and will hold my head high. If anyone needs a hand up, they need only ask. This is a time for strength and heart, even if our grief will undoubtedly wallop us with the occasional gust.

After the terrible blast eight years ago, I was stung by the reality that I did not do enough to prevent it. I vowed that would never happen again, and I got busy. Seldom an hour went by during the past eight years, when I wasn’t tormented and motivated to protect my country and the people who so richly deserved it.

As a white man, I had failed them for too long, casually keeping the riches of my lucky privilege tucked away where it did far too little good, for far too few people.

It was time to do better. Much better.

Even before that dark November evening in 2016, I never put my country on a pedestal, because I had seen what it was capable of. That it could hit rock bottom with such a gruesome thud, was a shock to the senses that will never leave me.

So we worked, and we rallied.

We picked ourselves up, and put one foot in front of the other until all of a sudden we were running with the wind at our backs. We discovered a bigger purpose, and ourselves. We marched, and rallied. We showed up, and we won.

Still, the darkness lingered … and even through our joy we knew the evil still menacingly stalked us.

We never could chase it away. Our government failed us catastrophically by not rounding up the terrible man who attacked us, locking him away and pronouncing loudly and clearly: NEVER AGAIN.

Instead our “justice” system let him linger to fester, and ooze. They normalized him with their disregard, and instead protected an ugly status quo in America in which all men and women are most certainly not treated equally.

The traitor should have never seen the light of day again. EVER.

Instead, the odious bottom-feeder was allowed plenty of air and water, and slowly we watched him grow and come to the surface with a renewed sense of entitlement, and ghastly purpose.

Our corporate media treated it all like some terrible game, when they should have been sounding the alarms and giving the most menacing threat in American history the editorial weight it deserved.

As a career journalist, it will always be impossible for me to reckon with this, and I call them out today and will continue to in the future with a renewed disdain.

So thanks to the failure of our justice system, and our broken media, it was once again going to be left to us to deal with the monster, and that has been the greatest insult and travesty of my lifetime.

There were mechanisms in place to deal with this man, and they purposely and catastrophically failed us.

It turns out there really was nobody coming to save us, and none of us should ever be good with that.

Today we have been left to fend for ourselves, but we are not alone. If you can hold onto just one thing, I hope it is that, good people.

We must lean on each other and stay together. We cannot succumb.

We have done all that we can, and should have no regrets.

Me?

I am NOT going back.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.