A darkness has descended on America. We must seek the air and light of hope.

Last Sunday, I drove across the Flint Hills and found myself unexpectedly awash in winter light. On Highway 177 in Chase County I passed the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve and the landscape became cinematic, the slanting rays of the afternoon sun rendering the tawny palette of February in arresting detail.

All was revealed.

Every stem of dry grass, all the rolling hills, each outcropping of broken limestone was illuminated beneath an azure sky streaked with clouds. It was a moment not be ignored, so I pulled the Jeep over and sat for a few minutes, regarding a landscape made fierce by air and light.

It was all the more dramatic for its wildness. There wasn’t another car on the highway for miles. I drank in the reprieve from the recent ice and snow, reveled in the mid-60 degree weather, and counted myself glad.

I had not known how weary I had become of the affairs of my country.

You may have felt something similar during the preceding weeks and months and years, of listening and reading and watching, of holding hope in your lungs and exhaling in despair. Of peering into glass screens as if trying to scry the future. I did not want the afternoon to end. If only I could dwell in the warming sun forever, I would be happy. But I had an appointment that would not keep in a town some distance to the north, so I put the Jeep in drive and pulled back onto the pavement.

Then a thought came to me.

“Who will lead us?”

It was as if somebody else had spoken the words that rang in my head.

There is no escape from the affairs of human beings, no reprieve from the responsibility of following current events, no clemency from the judgment of history. We may take a few moments to rest some afternoon in the middle of our political winter, but if we do not return to the task it is a surrender to the wolves that fill the world.

“Who will lead us?”

We have come to a juncture in American history that is far later than most think. I am haunted by the words of Abraham Lincoln, who in his last debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858 warned of the eternal struggle between freedom and tyranny. Central to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which the candidates vied for an Illinois senate seat, was the question of whether Kansas would be admitted as a free or a slave state.

“It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world,” Lincoln said, according to a transcript from the National Park Service. “They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

As a nation, we have never healed from the Civil War, never achieved the reconciliation between race and rage, never fulfilled in good faith the guarantees of birthright citizenship and Black suffrage. We have made advances and experienced setbacks, in a tragic never-ending cycle that plays out over the course of about a human lifetime, from the end of slavery in 1865 to the Klan marches of the 1920s, from the Civil Rights Movement to the final gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2023.

The rise of Trump in 2016 came with this last wave of regression, one aimed not only at historic minorities but also anybody whose skin or religion or love or gender orientation was different than the historic ruling class. Scrubbing the shame of fact from our textbooks will not remove the stain from our souls, no matter how hard we try.

But rising authoritarianism requires a scrubbing of collective memory, a sanitizing of the past to relieve the awful dissonance of fact. The generations of Americans now living are not responsible for injustices past, but it is absolutely our duty to correct the legacy of lingering inequality that has flowed from long-dead hands.

There was never a time when America was great, although we have always carried the promise of greatness within us. The tools are within our grasp to eliminate financial inequality, social injustice and cultural oppression. They are preserved in our Constitution and the rule of law, the good will of true citizens, the pilgrim souls of our artists and poets. The tools are preserved in our bone and blood and muscle, and every generation or so Americans are called up to put themselves bodily in defense of democracy — in the Wheatfield of Gettysburg, at Omaha and Utah beaches at Normandy, at Ground Zero in New York.

Those who placed their bodies on the line for democracy were also on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, at Kent State University in Ohio and in the ranks of the police officers at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Who will lead us?”

That’s the question that echoes as Donald Trump gathers ever more power to his oligarchic, neo-authoritarian rule. In less than a fortnight, Trump issued a raft of executive orders remarkable for their cruelty and unfettered by any allegiance to the rule of law.

The orders seek to end birthright citizenship, eliminate protections for transgender people and engage in the mass deportation of migrants. His nominees for important federal agencies are, nearly without exception, unqualified in all but their loyalty to Trump. He has created a quasi-governmental agency called the Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE, a pun on a cryptocurrency but also the honorific for the lifetime leader of a medieval Italian city-state — and appointed Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to run amok with it.

Musk, who spent $288 million to help elect Trump, has literally been given the keys to the U.S. Treasury. Musk or his associates have seized access to the federal payment systems, including those that process Medicare and Medicaid checks. Musk has also halted all work by USAID, which distributes foreign aid, and has called the agency a “criminal enterprise.”

Trump has also, in this short time, blamed without evidence DEI programs — short for diversity, equity and inclusion — for the horrific plane crash late last month that killed all 67 aboard a commuter flight from Wichita to Washington, D.C. The aircraft collided with a military Black Hawk helicopter, whose crew of three was also lost. For Trump to use a national tragedy in a craven attempt to further his political agenda shames only those who fail to denounce it.

Trump has ordered all DEI programs scrubbed from federal agencies, has pressured federal employees to take buyouts or face layoffs, and has pardoned all 1,500 charged or convicted in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He has ignited a tariff war, talked of invading Greenland and taking back the Panama Canal, and is entertaining sending violent criminals who are U.S. citizens to a hellish prison in El Salvador. He also announced during a joint press conference with the Israeli prime minister that the U.S. military would seize Gaza and displace the nearly 2 million people living there.

Many of his executive actions would be grounds for impeachment. Some of his statements — including his suggestion of ethnic cleansing of Gaza — are likely sufficient to initiate removal under the 25th Amendment. Strictly, he shouldn’t even be president, because the 14th Amendment disqualifies insurrectionists. Then there’s the matter of his 34 felony convictions, which made Trump the first former, and now the first sitting, president to be found guilty of such serious crimes. Is it any wonder that his FBI nominee, Kash Patel, is a barking mad conspiracy theorist who published a 60-name “deep state” enemies list?

Yet, the American people have been slow to wake to the danger.

While protests have increased and some politicians have ratcheted up the rhetoric, there has yet to emerge a unified strategy to resist the Trump-Musk kneecapping of government. Democrats, cowed by Trump’s victory and the hammer blows of executive action, are seemingly paralyzed. Nobody has emerged as the voice of the opposition.

Meanwhile, millions of tons of food — some of it from Kansas — bound for hungry people around the globe is rotting on docks because of the freeze of USAID. Musk has access to the retirement and health care information of you and me and just about every other American. And GOP quislings like Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas are shamelessly parroting Trump’s unfounded and offensive claims about DEI being to blame for American Airlines Flight 5342.

“Who will lead us?”

I am reminded of what Helen Keller, who overcame blindness and deafness to become an American icon, told an Associated Press reporter in Kansas City in 1938.

She said she felt “a darkness without a name” in the world around her.

“I am terribly shaken,” Keller said about the rise of fascism in Europe. Although she was at heart an optimist, she said current events had left her with little hope.

Despite some parallels, this is not 1938.

The authoritarian threat is now firmly established in the White House, not from any outside menace but by our own actions. I suspect many of those who voted for Trump on Nov. 5 might have more than a little buyer’s remorse, but it’s too late for that. The machinery of government is being demolished before our eyes and the scrap turned over to the world’s richest man.

The time for action is now.

“Who will lead us?”

We can no longer wait for someone to lead us; we must lead ourselves through this darkness without a name. We must engage in peaceful protest, reasoned argument, and effective resistance. We must be civil evangels of democracy. We must come together not under the banner of any particular party, but for the “common right of humanity” as Americans. A new Abraham or Martin or John may yet emerge to guide us, but until then we must use our voices, our bodies, and our souls to preserve the tools which might someday make America truly great. To shy away from the eternal struggle is to embrace the darkness.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.