This is painful to witness.

Watching the White House’s beautiful East Wing being leveled by bulldozers, seeing decades of our nation’s rich history crumbling in a few senseless seconds, it’s impossible not to see it as a microcosm of what has been happening for the last ten months, and really the past decade.

Trump is doing to it what he has been doing to America: tearing down generations of progress and possibility, disfiguring and erasing the work of so many who have come before him, and rebuilding it into his own bloated, garish, grotesque image.

This renovation, like so much of this authoritarian regime’s work, is about the desecration of the sacred, about leveling the legacy of American Democracy and demoralizing those who’ve spent their lives contributing to it. It is an intentional piece of propaganda.

I think that’s why the videos hit me so hard, because there in the rubble of the People’s House, I am reminded of everything that is being dismantled well beyond those hallowed halls, of all that is being lost, of the recklessness and waste we’re bearing witness to.

Amidst the quick destruction of stone and wood and glass, the grief and fury swirl within my chest as I am reminded how much of the place we love and call home is gone forever: the hard-earned progress of generations of civil rights activism leveled with the cruel stroke of a madman’s pen, two hundred and fifty years of global partnerships ravaged in the capricious impulsivity of one fragile narcissist, the irreplaceable work of hundreds of millions of hands, quickly torn asunder in callous disregard for what has been,the rich, weather-worn patina of a flawed nation striving to become a more perfect union, covered over by the tacky opulence of classless white trash squatters.

And it’s tempting to succumb to hopelessness in the face of so much rapid attrition and swift destruction; to allow our spirits to be crushed along with the East Wing’s walls and windows, to let our resolve die in the rubble of America’s lost liberties and freedoms.

But that is what the destroyers want, and so we cannot consent.

The good people still left here need to transform our mourning into outrage, and let that internal unrest fuel our outward resistance. We need to courageously step into the path of the bulldozers: the unmarked vans and the masked thugs and the gerrymanderers and the corrupt congressmen and the compromised preachers and the social media propagandists and the street corner bigots, so that we do not lose more than we already have.

Yes, the White House, like the nation it represents, has been irreparably damaged, but there is still so much worth preserving, so much worth protecting, so much worth saving. We cannot allow our breathtaking sorrow over what no longer is to keep us from fighting like hell for what can still be.

This President and his cadre of willing acolytes intend to engineer the demolition of America, but We the People will prove ourselves indestructible, and once we dismantle them, we will rebuild something beautiful.

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