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Editor’s Note: There is no shortage of advice and social media chatter urging us to “focus on what you can control.” These are precisely the kinds of times when it feels easiest to look away and lose ourselves in distraction. I urge you to resist that impulse. Stay engaged, like the No Kings Day. Put your heart and mind out in the open. We cannot allow this temporary administration to harden into a new normal. We will get through it, but we must insist on learning from it. It is possible we will come out better, more aware, more involved than we were before, but it starts with staying engaged.

Keep fighting.

Most people my age grow up hearing the old adage, "Patience is a virtue." Patience has always been a problem of mine. My father was phenomenally patient. He handled most things with prayer and humor. I've come to patience only slowly. When our kids learned to drive, they predominantly depended on Mom. After I saw my oldest son doing a Flintstone-type of driving with one foot on the gas and one on the brake, I was out.

I grew up playing sports and have enough knowledge of baseball to hang with any old-timer of the game, yet when it came to coaching, I left that to someone else. I was a decent player in my youth, even played a bit of college ball, but I knew my lack of patience would not bode well for my sons or the other players (even though I do like to mention the one time I stepped in to coach during a flag football season and we throttled the other team).

Life tends to temper expectations, and patience gets better with age. You separate the big stuff from the small stuff and find more joy in the mundane. Patience is an absolute necessity in waiting for the wheels of democracy to turn, and to coping with fellow Americans.

If there is a term to describe the current regime, it is impatient and cruel. It has brought out the worst in people. Targeting diversity, the exact characteristic that separates America from most countries, was sinister. Our public institutions are being operated as if empathy and an appreciation of history were signs of weakness.

Patience is a real virtue right now since our country is acting like a spoiled juvenile; arrogant, reactive, and telling others what to do. That’s not what a democracy does. We’re the type of government that requires constant maintenance and growth. For those used to a certain way of seeing or doing things, growth can be quite unsettling.

Ask any well-meaning person how to address someone who uses they/them pronouns, or how to talk about an American who might be Black or Hispanic. You'll sense the fear of getting something wrong. We're simultaneously more aware and more self-conscious of differences, which is progress, but it also creates a whole bunch of tension and discomfort. That’s normal for a democracy, but for some, well, it’s just easier to keep to the old model.

Juggling more emotional, legal, and ethical expectations than any previous generation can be quite a load to carry. All kinds of predatory influencers know this and like to pick at issues and cause division. It's little wonder that many Americans yearn for the simplicity of clear rules and clean hierarchies: know your place, stay in your lane, keep to the pecking order. The certainty of "law and order" or traditional forms of faith feels secure amidst all of this.

That's where this administration has failed us significantly. They’ve marketed our growth and strengths as signs of weakness. Typically, a leader would steady the nation, not actively seek to divide it. We have no Roosevelt to reassure us during war or economic downturn, no Martin Luther King to bring moral clarity to the resurgence of institutional racism.

There is simply no leader in this regime telling the truth.

Instead, we've gotten executive orders and private grifting. We stomach midnight tweets and happiness at the death of other Americans.

This takes a helluva lot of patience to stomach.

What's eroded isn't only faith in authority but faith in competence. Democracy runs on education, not edicts. When the institutions we once relied upon no longer model credibility, we can't expect citizens to act credible either. In this environment, anger substitutes for patient wisdom. That anger is a coping mechanism for people overwhelmed by this regime because we know what history says about conforming. If it gets weaponized, it becomes a purity test, and purity soon demands a specific identity. Before you know it, you are chasing people through the streets, splitting up families, expecting certain papers, banning books, calling your neighbors your enemies, and denying the entire identity of American history.

Maybe our current anger is borne from embarrassment. Moving past such an administration will happen, but it may not be entirely pleasant. This era will stick to us like pedophilia has stuck to the Catholic Church. Coping skills will be tested. When we get through it, there will be laws to enforce, education to revamp, spiritual guidance to seek, and enablers to remove.

History's great reckonings have never been fast or clean, but they came. Our country will also find its way back, but it’s going to take patience.

We must have the patience to drag our country back to the future it was always made for.

If there is one thing that does bring misery to me, its pieces like this that get published by a well known group in a well known paper, and yet….it means nothing.

What the author calls misery is so far misplaced, I don’t know where to begin. What the country has lacked for some time is responsible leadership that we can depend upon. That includes all branches of government. With the onset of the Trump and Fox years, we’ve become so used to spin and lies serving as the dominant story, it blinds the real culprit: corporate greed.

What the author briefly mentions as entitlements are normal parts of advanced nations in the rest of the world. It might just be that corporate America is banking on misery as a profit machine. You can see this in decisions related to healthcare bankruptcies, for-profit jails and prisons, universities and for-profit schools who put students into debt, and so on. I cannot conceive of what the author is trying to get at except it’s the old pull yourself up by the bootstraps nonsense while giving a blind eye to the fleecing of America.

It is so out of touch and typical of 1% type gluttony, one can only pause and slap their head at the Post and their former motto of Democracy Dies in Darkness. A newspaper that publishes pieces like this is no longer the serious type that once brought down a corrupt president in its glorified past.

My goodness. This one really burns me. I am the stereotypical broken record at the impoverishment of working-class Americans when it comes to healthcare. There are many people like this poor aunt who fill the voids in personal and work lives. They take jobs that others can’t or won’t. They are eternally optimistic or good-natured despite anything that occurs. And yet…

The richest country in the world can’t afford to provide healthcare to its citizens. I’ve had enough of this bamboozling, and I hope you do, too. If there is anything to change the nature of America, to get back to the “We the people and the pursuit of happiness”, it is to connect everyone in a shared appreciation of good health. The lack of investment in the greater citizenry is wrecking us.

And Now….

Keep up your reading and your progress. Question anything you hear in modern media. Learn from actual books.

Continue to practice your gratefulness.

Always strive to be a good human.