I am more optimistic about America because of a family I met this morning at breakfast.
The local McDonald’s, where I often stop for coffee, has a diverse clientele, from Metropolitan Police officers and people with toddlers to a young Black gay couple and a man working on his laptop.
A Jamaican woman named Rose, who has chatted with me about politics before, comes in with her granddaughters Zaira and Aria. The girls run around her and dance together as they wait for their order. Aria, the younger of the two, is 20 months old. She climbs into my booth and sits across from me. Zaira and Rose join her.
Aria, a lively child oblivious to the racial distrust plaguing so many of her elders, offers me her hash browns, breakfast burrito, and blue raspberry frozen drink. I thank her and tell her I have already eaten and to enjoy them herself.
These are among the people Trump says are poisoning our blood. He is projecting as usual. Zaira says she is Jamerican, short for Jamaican American. I say to Aria, “You want to hear me use ‘Jamaican’ in a sentence? Jamaican a lot of noise.” Her older sister laughs.
Rose’s name makes me think of the musical “Gypsy,” except this Rose is a far cry from the stage mother from Hell portrayed in that show. I sing quietly to the girls, “You can do it, all you need is a hand. We can do it, Nana is gonna see to it.”
Nana Rose tells the girls, “OK, let’s go before the rain comes again,” and they start to leave. Aria turns back to wave and does a little dance for me. This actual toddler would make a better president than the Mobster Manchild of Mar-a-Lago.
As I linger over my coffee, a handsome cop with a salt-and-pepper beard whom I’ve met before smiles and places a hand on my shoulder as he walks by. We are a long way from the Stonewall Rebellion.
Some members of our community a few years ago demanded that LGBTQ+ police officers be prohibited from participating in the Capital Pride parade. Treating all police as the enemy is counterproductive, to say the very least. Just as Trump would rather campaign on the border problem than solve it, some on the left would rather cry out about injustice than work across our diversity to overcome it.
If you insist that anything short of paradise is a betrayal, you will not get far. If you think your trauma entitles you to hold everyone else hostage, I wish to announce that you are traumatizing me.
The bullies on the radical right often invoke their faith. Faith requires no proof. Yet many people over the centuries spent a lot of time and effort attempting to prove the existence of God. One such proof states, “A watch implies a watchmaker,” which analogizes the universe to a watch. This is problematic. On one hand, the universe is far messier than a watch. On the other hand, it is far more glorious. And isn’t it blasphemous to reduce God to a watchmaker?
The people at Heritage Foundation and its allies who wrote Project 2025 to map out a second Trump administration are what you might call political watchmakers. They have worked out in fine detail the radical changes they want to make to this country.
Their watches are more like handcuffs. I much prefer our messy, contentious country to the fascists’ fantasy version “cleansed” of anyone who doesn’t look and think like themselves.
One of my favorite things about Washington is that it is an international city. One often hears conversations in other languages. This is only a problem for bigots. But the Republican presidential nominee, who traffics in hatred and division, is ready to deport millions. That, like his proposed tariffs, would harm our economy. He would blame others, just as he recently blamed Jews—at an event about fighting antisemitism—in anticipation of his electoral defeat.
This election, in the end, is not about Trump but our own character. The aspects of our history that he and his diehards consider embarrassments to be erased are part of our journey. We are better for confronting the truth rather than concealing it.
Diversity is neither a weakness nor a threat. It is an essential part of who we are as a nation.
The authoritarians regard civil rights advances as a distasteful interruption of their divinely ordained supremacy. Let us disappoint them once again.
