Mourning the Loss of a Mythical America
But if millions of people keep marching in the streets, maybe we can build something new and better.
For quite some time, I’ve been trying to formulate something in my own mind that
articulated brilliantly in a recent post. The shock, anger and grief I have been feeling in the face of the Trump regime’s bulldozing of American institutions has been based, in large part, on a fantasy of an America that never really existed.Like Pavlovitz, my own privilege has made me grieve the loss of an America that never was.
I am the first college graduate in my family. I had no generational wealth to launch me into adulthood. As a woman, I’ve experienced plenty of discrimination and harassment over the years, and faced barriers in my professional career based solely on my gender. But on balance I’ve benefited from a privilege I barely knew I possessed, based solely on the color of my skin in a country organized around a race-based caste system.
Pavlovitz writes:
Growing up I believed every word about America as the land of the free and home of the brave. I imagined us to be that singular, brilliant beacon to the world, welcoming every weary soul who sought sanctuary on its shores.
The American dream was a thing to me; a beautiful, sparkling, attainable thing. All that Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness stuff—I ate it all up, wore it on my sleeve, and saluted it when they ran it up the flagpole.
It was easy to do that from the cozy shoes I'd always been standing in. America had been good to me.
I was never quite so credulous. When I was nine years old, my mother was arrested at an anti-Vietnam war protest in Chicago when she was a delegate for Eugene McCarthy at the Democratic national convention in 1968. She took my brother and me to civil rights marches and antiwar demonstrations. As a young editor at the New York Times, my father played a tangential role in supporting the team that broke the story about “The Pentagon Papers,” and was an editor behind the scenes for reporting by the likes of Sydney Schanberg, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war in Cambodia. Our dinner table conversation was about current events at a volatile time in our country’s history, and I experienced a relatively early political awakening as a result.
In elementary school, it upset me when I noticed how my Black classmates were treated more harshly than I was for the same infractions (little things like talking out of turn). In middle school, I wore black armbands and badges with peace symbols to school. In high school, I refused to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance. In college, I burned my bra and joined feminist consciousness-raising groups.
Still, the ideology of America as “the land of the free” couldn’t help but shape me. I knew the United States had never lived up to its principles, but I believed in those principles and wanted to think that my fellow Americans did, too. When I later chose to become an immigration lawyer, there was still a part of me that imagined that the United States could be that special place of safety and refuge for oppressed people from around the world.
But as Pavlovitz says, that America was never most people’s America. It was never the land of the free for people of color, especially African Americans; for indigenous people; for LGBTQ+ people; for religious minorities, especially Muslims, Jews and anyone who is not the right kind of Christian; for women; or for most immigrants.
So what exactly am I mourning?
, who I look at as a hero of the resistance, wrote a book entitled How The South Won the Civil War, whose title speaks for itself. However, she also believes there is still hope for redemption. As Kim Phillips-Fein put it in a review of another book by Richardson, Democracy Awakening:One interpretation of American history today presents the country as irredeemably tainted by its past, a sordid history of racism, slavery, and violent conquest. Richardson contends that this is only part of the story and that the “fundamental principles” of the nation have tended toward egalitarianism; often, however, it has been up to marginalized groups—women, Indigenous people, and especially Black Americans—to remind the rest of the country of its creed.
Since Trump reassumed office in January 2025, I’ve been saying to friends and family that our only hope is for people to take to the streets to protest the autocratic takeover of the federal government. History has shown that mass demonstrations do make a difference. So while I was gratified at the turnout on April 5, it was disappointing — though not unexpected — that few images depicting the extent of the marches graced the “front pages” (paper or virtual) of the major American media outlets.
As
writes [emphasis added]:This weekend, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE took to the streets of America to protest Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and what this administration of dangerous idiots, creepy billionaires and outright white supremacist fascists are doing to this country.
MILLIONS OF PEOPLE! There were 1,500 registered protests and hundreds more that just sprung up spontaneously in places where nothing had been planned but people said… “F*ck it! Let’s just go down to the courthouse!”
You would think this would be front page news. This would be blasting every 20 minutes of “Breaking News” and “This Just In!” and “Happening Now in the Situation Room!”
But, according to CNN, it was “scores of people” and USA Today said it was “tens of thousands” which was at least more than FOX News which said it was just “thousands of people.”
Of course, protests alone don’t topple dictatorships or create new institutions. But making clear to those leading the coup that has taken over the federal government that the majority of Americans do not support their actions is critical. Turning out the vote in 2026 and toppling the Republican majorities in the House and Senate is critical. And overall, the importance of a robust civil society cannot be overstated.
America may never have lived up to its stated ideals. Many of us may have spent most of our lives wearing metaphorical blinders against this essential truth. But that doesn’t mean we have to accept the wholesale destruction of important, fundamental, even aspirational ideals.
We cannot give in to the forces of darkness without a fight.