Loving a Lie. Losing a Nation.

Christine Merser, May 20, 2025

I just read that we undervalue health when we’ve never had a health scare, and we undervalue wealth when we’ve never worried about finances, and we undervalue kindness when we’ve never experienced cruelty. I could go on but you get the picture.

In the last week, I’ve probably gotten five or six emails and had three or four conversations with people I’m relatively close to who are all telling me the same thing. They can’t take it anymore. They can’t read about it. They can’t talk about it. They have to do something else besides focus on what is happening in our country.

One friend is focusing on flowers. Another, a woman I haven’t seen in decades since high school but who signed up for my newsletter, unsubscribed four days later. She wrote to say she’s been through cancer and other personal trauma, including the loss of a brother she believes MAGA took from her, and she just can’t take in more pain. She said she’s pulled away. No more news. No more politics. Nothing.

And, and, and… I could go through the rest, but they all have the same theme. And woven into that theme is a hint of regret? Maybe it’s shame? Maybe it’s a feeling that they should be able to do more or show up more fully? Or maybe they’re just reacting to being in conversation with me, someone who seems so immersed in all of this.

I understand them. I sometimes feel that way too. But for me, it only lasts half a day, usually less. I call a particular person, S, who brings me back in five minutes. Sometimes I think I was made for moments like these.

I was obsessed with the Holocaust from the time I was in eighth grade. Still am. I asked my therapist why years ago and he said my own childhood trauma was so great that I could only feel things by absorbing even greater trauma. He wasn’t comparing my childhood to the Holocaust, of course. He was saying that reading about it gave me access to feelings I otherwise had to shut down.

We are all made differently. Maybe I’m not so pained by what is enormous to the next person. It’s not a judgement of any of us.

There are people I no longer speak to and they might wonder why I can understand someone needing to walk away from the moment we’re living in but not forgive their support of Donald Trump.

This morning, I was on a call with a client who lives in a Trump enclave. Many of their friends are MAGA supporters. He and his wife were at a family friend’s house with their kids. In the bathroom, there was a picture of Trump pointing, saying something. He couldn’t remember the quote. But there was also a full-size Trump poster in the basement and MAGA memorabilia all over the place. He tries to stay out of political conversation, even though this friend keeps pulling him in. On the way home, he said to his wife, “Maybe we need to start walking away from these people.” His wife replied, “But how would we feel if they walked away from us just because we’re not Trump supporters?”

I said that for me the difference is that this is no longer about a difference of opinion about whether we should tax a group or not. It’s about good versus evil. Right versus wrong. It’s about who each of us are as human beings and what we believe is honorable. Our core values.

I can’t be friends with Trump supporters. Not real friends. Polite, but not break bread. Everyone has to decide what they are giving up to not have the conversations that go unsaid.

But mostly it’s the pain I see in everyone, the weariness, the silence, the surrender, that gave me pause this week.

In the early hours, when I woke up deeply troubled, I realized something. Someone has died. It’s not a person, but it might as well be.

We are grieving. Real grief. The kind that sits in your chest like a boulder.

We Americans love our country. Deeply. We were raised to love her. She is a part of us, like our parents, sisters and brothers. From the time we were little, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, marching in Fourth of July parades, hearing stories of valor and virtue, we were steeped in patriotic pride. But now, we’re learning that much of what we believed was a myth. Smoke and mirrors. A curated history that didn’t tell the whole story.

So we’re not just grieving what we’re becoming, we’re grieving what we thought we were. And it turns out, we weren’t.

The fabric of our life looks different. We have no idea how to wear it now.

It’s like learning, as your father is dying, that he was a monster. That the man you thought handed out candy on the corner was actually a mobster who hurt people. The man who you thought protected everyone only protected you. Others weren’t protected at all. It was a mirage. That the people around him that you admired were complicit, silent, or worse.

The country that swaddled me in red, white, and blue… that wrapped me in fireworks and hot dogs and Motown and pride… was, in many ways, a lie. Others didn’t experience him that way at all. And while I sort of knew it, I didn’t know it.

We are grieving, my friends. We are in mourning.

And still, even as we grieve, we must face the daily onslaught of the crisis caused by bad people doing horrendous things as they take apart what was decent about our country and something else dies every single day. Another thing disappoints. The news organizations we believed in. Companies we trusted. Justice we thought couldn’t fail.

And through it all we must not give up. We must press forward. Every day brings another call to action, another moment where we can say yes or no, and sometimes we don’t even know which is which.

We have decisions to make that we never thought we’d have to make. Will we have enough money? Will there be health care? Will there be vaccines? Will there be goods and services? Will only the billionaires and millionaires have good lives and good health and homes?

Well, guess what? Many Americans have worried about these things their whole lives. We are in good company. We can do this. Millions of us have a lot of power. We just have to turn it on, and we will.

Right now we are confused, sad, defeated, terrified, hopeful, encouraged, defiant, angry… and by the end of the day, we are just plain fucking exhausted.

But get this. I am sure of one thing. I’m grateful this is happening now. I am so grateful we are seeing scorched earth. Because now, maybe, we can build it the way we thought it was. There is no safety in smokes and mirrors.

They are not going to win. Just ask Rachel Maddow. Just ask Pete Buttigieg. There are hundreds, no thousands, nope millions, of Americans like you and me who are going to do whatever it takes to build a country we can actually be proud of. And while not everyone is built to participate every day in every way, they will join when they can as they can, and we will do it together. I’m sure of it.

We can suffer a bit in the meantime. We have had it way too easy for way too long.

And each of us can help the person next door.

Yes, I’m worried about things. But we can fix many things in our communities. And if the government won’t, we will, at least temporarily. Look at Netflix, they’re putting Sesame Street up on streaming.

Do you know how Sesame Street began?

My sister lived with Jason Epstein, editor-in-chief at Random House, for ten years. In the 1960s, he and a bunch of New York literary minds were at a dinner party in the Hamptons with Joan Ganz Cooney, and they started talking about an article in the New Yorker about how kids in Harlem were arriving at first grade already behind. Kids on Park Avenue knew how to read. The game was lost before it started. That night, they dreamed up Sesame Street at the dining room table. A way to close the gap. To give poor kids access to preschool-level learning through TV. PBS aired it and the world changed for millions of children. A few people at the dining room table.

Yes, the government helped, but it started with humans, like you and me.

The last fifty years, we haven’t had to do anything. We relied on the government to do it all. But while we fight to take back the country, we also have to get back into the neighborhoods. Our communities.

One of the few things that helps with grief is doing good deeds for others. So I’m all in.

But today, I want to say it out loud. I am grieving. I am in mourning. For my lost country. I think this is the biggest death of my life.

I wasn’t very close to my parents, both of whom are gone now. I am kinder toward their memories than I was toward them in life. I will be kinder toward this moment in time and my fellow Americans after they no longer are in power. At least I hope I will.

For now, I am grieving. And tomorrow, I will fight again.

So grieve however you need to. If that means turning off the news and tending to your flowers, my friends, do it. You don’t need to read horror stories to help your American neighbor. You can do that without the news.

And by the way, please buy a flag. Hang it. We can all do that. They do not get to take our flag. Let every house fly one so no one can tell who lives inside. Every single house. I am no longer willing to see flags and think ‘they’ are owning the street I live on. Let them wonder who lives on the streets they think they own.