Tom Nichols

Cornel West jumped in a pool to go swimming in Sacramento.

They emptied the pool while he was in it.

That's not distant.

So I've always been aspirational about the country.

This is Langston Hughes to invoke, to echo Mitch, what America could be, right?

And so my love is not abstract because sometimes to my ear, Nicole, American patriotism sounds like a rebel yell.

right?

And so my orientation has been to love folk on the ground, close to the ground, the people who aren't kind of caught up in the abstraction, but who are dreaming dreams and trying to make their dreams a reality.

And the way in which I evidence that love is by trying to manifest what my parents and my great-grandmother put in me.

And so that's not painted onto the country because the

The only way we're going to get to the other side of the madness, and let me put it this way, whenever the fever dream spikes in America, in my reading of our history, our task has been to make sure our babies get to the other side because we don't know what's going to happen.

So our task is to make sure they survive the storm and get to the other side.

So we're in the midst of another fever dream.

I don't know if the country is going to survive.

The only thing I can do is to speak truth to power and to love unconditionally in the midst of this, right?

And I can't find comfort in the illusion or the myth that

of the American project, right?

I can only find comfort in the battles that we have waged, right?

That have made the country what it is and what it can be.

And that gets me up in the morning.