Completing the Trump Era

An exploration of the deeper causes and the path forward

On this Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025, there is nothing I would like better than to be witnessing the inauguration of President Kamala Harris. I’m eager to end the Trump era and turn the page to a new one. 

But the point of this quite long article is to look more deeply at why Trump and his MAGA movement arose and how we get to the completion of that purpose, from a 35,000 foot perspective. This can inform what we do next.

My frame is not that the Trump era has only been a misguided detour for our country but that it actually has served a deeper purpose than what we may first think (and what MAGA believes as well).

Simply put, from an evolutionary standpoint, I believe that Trump has been a key catalyst for us to surface, face, and ultimately move beyond the traumatized psychology of the patriarchal era.  And that moving beyond the patriarchal era of America is at the heart of how we fulfill our highest destiny as a country.

Like the grain of sand that irritates an oyster into making a pearl, Trump’s deeper function has been to propel the emergence of a more mature level of consciousness for our country - one that is wiser, more gender-balanced, and whole - through intense irritation and dissonance, which forces the emergent consciousness to strengthen. 

I believe we will only fully understand this function in the rear view mirror of history but attempting to look at it now is, I believe, useful to charting a positive path forward.

To understand why the Trump phenomenon arose, we need to reflect on the core patterning of the patriarchal era, which can be summarized by the simple phrase “dominate or be dominated.”  It is not just women or people of color who have been oppressed in this era (although they certainly got more than their share).  The most powerful men have largely taken advantage of less powerful men as well, which set up an intense competition for power.

Basically, unless you were a top dog, you were probably taken advantage of, for thousands of years.

This caused a fiercely competitive dynamic for power, which resulted in a callousness towards those who are dominated for the simple reason that too much empathy could block the drive to dominate.  That is why men were raised, for millennia, to be tough and unfeeling.  They needed to steel themselves to the suffering of others in order to win the race to dominate … or be dominated themselves.

Western society thus prioritized gladiators to win battles, not wise men to make good decisions for the whole. This primal, fierce competition for power, led by men, was the signature dynamic of the five thousand plus years of this era in human civilization.

Those who won the battle for power had license to take advantage of the dominated for personal advantage. To the victor belongs the spoils.

Even while the rise of democracy in the last 250 years has shifted this paradigm to some degree by establishing fundamental rights and legal protections for all, the deeper dynamic in the culture has persisted. 

Ruthless competition for power has been an existential imperative, particularly for men. The prime directive for a man historically was to build his ability to dominate physically, psychologically, intellectually, and economically so that he did not become the exploited.

So the primary goal of raising boys in the patriarchal era was to make them strong, tough, and ambitious so that they could outcompete other males to win the fruits of dominance for themselves, their family and their tribe. 

Signs of softness, femininity or vulnerability were considered a threat to this function for the in-group, which is part of why more traditional patriarchal cultures often vilified male homosexuality in dramatic ways.  It was threatening to the imperative of raising physically aggressive and dominant men who could protect the tribe from being dominated by others.

This pattern has thankfully evolved in the last few hundred years with successive movements that have established democracy and the rule of law, ended slavery, empowered women, and established more rights and protections for the less powerful. International law and norms have also gradually reduced the threat of physical violence in the form of war (although those threats are not yet gone). We’ve apprehended more predators and cut down on criminality.

There’s been a maturation and refinement of the paradigm of masculinity such that many men are more comfortable and conscious of the full spectrum of their humanity, with more empathy, care and commitment to others. In America at least, we’ve come to largely accept homosexuality as our culture evolved past the dominance game, creating more space for authentic self-expression.

With that said, the traumas of the patriarchal era still live in ways too numerous to count, from the ongoing prevalence of spanking children to rampant violence against women to the brutality of war. Much of this ongoing aggression results from unhealed traumas people have experienced which then create an existential imperative to seize power and wield that power ruthlessly.

Basically, victims become aggressors as part of a survival strategy.

Almost every man and woman carries personal, familial, and ancestral residue from the thousands of years of dominance culture, whether that is through being abused, bullied, enslaved, raped, or exploited in some other way. 

We all have some residual fear, passed down in the culture as well as through family lines, that a loss of power leads to victimization, exploitation, and trauma. It’s part of why most men still have resistance to vulnerability and there’s a glorification of sports that lionize physically dominant males, such as American football.

So the collective psychology of our patriarchal phase of growth as a country has been built on a deep undercurrent of fear, since those who occupy lower status rungs of our society can be taken advantage of by the more powerful. The core fear is losing power, which means loss of money, status, and sovereignty.

That’s why strength is the #1 word used in politics.

In the context of that history, Trump arose as an almost archetypal embodiment of the drive towards masculine dominance. He is relentlessly focused on winning, never admits weakness (or apologizes), engages in near constant verbal aggression and gravitates towards any sign of domination (which leads him to lie about everything from wealth to crowd size). He also nearly always brags about his status, intelligence, or skills.

The worst thing for Trump is to be a loser, which is part of why he was never able to accept his 2020 loss, since it threatened his core identity.  Admitting a loss of power is a kind of death for his version of unconscious, primal masculinity.

As a representative of unadulterated alpha male energy who cultivated a reputation for winning and success, Trump has often gotten a free pass from supporters who overtly or covertly see his dominance as a way to protect their values or way of life.  They want the power he wields for their themselves and their priorities.

While it is mostly no longer culturally permissible to act in ways that Trump has (from assaulting women to denigrating minorities), the fact that he does it and continues to amass more wealth and power allows men in particular a sense of power by proxy. By expressing the id of patriarchal males - power at any cost - and continuing to “win,” he greenlights instinctual drives in men.

They literally feel more powerful because he is breaking cultural rules AND he’s doing so in the service of their culture or their values (at least that is what he claims). He’s their stand-in in the culture war, which is ultimately a war against the turning of an era.

This has led so many MAGA men (and women) to excuse everything from his assaults of women to fraud because they feel that he is going to protect THEIR social status or privileges.

In a dog-eat-dog world, they want the biggest, meanest dog to protect them and also to summon their own fierceness. Just as a ferocious football team catalyzes a flood of testosterone, so does Trump, particularly for men.

At the Republican national convention, there’s a reason Trump chose to have Dana White of the UFC introduce him. Trump wanted to established his credentials as the most dominant male, which meant associating himself with the world’s top fighters.

In thousands of ways, he has sculpted himself as an archetypal, old guard patriarchal figure, with cruelty to match egotism, grandiosity to pair with ruthlessness.

All of the above is why Trump’s early and core base skewed heavily male and particularly males who have moved down the social hierarchy in recent decades economically.  It’s not that rural white males or working class males are all racist, it’s that they were losing status, money or power in the culture and that elicited the intense, primal drive to regain power at any cost.

Seeing the development of MAGA as a trauma response to thousands of years of patriarchy makes it all a bit more understandable.

Trump’s promise during his early political rise was that he could inspire their strength, reboot their competitive dominance and overcome the more educated and affluent elite knowledge workers whose standing and power in society had gone way up. 

It wasn’t just about making “America great” it was about making a sub-culture of somewhat defeated males feel strong and powerful again.

And because the reclamation of this strength was based on a zero-sum ideology, it needed to have another group of people that was beneath it that could be denigrated: immigrants.

So Trump gave a sub-population of American men both an infusion of confidence and a scapegoat to dominate: immigrants. While racism is certainly part of this equation, I believe the racism is secondary to dominance culture. If skin color gives one higher status then it becomes part of what allows someone to be part of the dominant class or group. Trump needed to establish a class of people that his core patriarchal cultural base could feel power over.

In that sense, his belligerent and alpha dominant energy became a kind of visceral inspiration for men who saw that their standing in society had slipped. This was particularly true for older men who saw their traditional occupations and values were no longer held in the same high regard by the society. The decline of testosterone with aging also undermines the sense of dominance and power in older men. Seeing Trump go to battle gave older men a hormonal boost.

That’s why he has spoken in such exaggerated terms about America as a nation in decline. He is speaking to people who feel “their” corner of America (and thus their personal standing) is in decline.

It’s simply not true that America is the hellscape he has often depicted but for a core base that is more culturally patriarchal, there has been a palpable loss in power and status with the rapid cultural shifts in recent decades, which triggers the visceral fears of no longer being on top.

The inherited experience is that if you are not on top, as a man, you become the exploited. So any experience of loss of power triggers a collective trauma reaction to move, even violently if necessary, towards regaining power.

Trump became their culture warrior and their personal hero - wealthy, unapologetic, and combative. He depicted himself as the ultimate strongman, all the way down to having his own action figures. And that’s connected to why I think Trump looks up to strongmen and dictators globally - they do for him what he does for his supporters, which is to inspire the impulse to dominate. He’s using them to summon his strength in the same way many men use American football to juice their testosterone.

All of this has been out of step with a growing mainstream of American culture, which has become more equal for men and women and less racist as well. But it wasn’t out of step with a solid base of supporters on the right, who began to see him as a kind of Messiah leading them to the promised land, which is a version of America based on past masculine glories of power rather than our future glories, which are going to be based on gender balance and a more holistic wisdom.

Thus, in the waning moments of American patriarchy, Trump became the leading man in revitalizing the dominant male psychology of the patriarchal era in aggressive, crude, and even violent ways. Underneath, there was simply a great deal of fear. Fear of losing relevance. Fear of not being celebrated. Fear of being taken advantage of. Fear of literally dying.

Trump’s transgressions gave license and permission to the instinctual energies behind the drive to re-establish dominance. He inspired his male followers to cast off the fetters of cancel culture and PC speech, both of which arose to suppress, condemn, or contain old dominance patterns. By showing that the bully could still win, he gave permission to the drive to dominate in many men.

He thus made at least some men feel more powerful and masculine again at a time in which women are becoming ever more powerful in the society. And yes, to be clear, there were plenty of women who have rallied behind him but I think part of the subtext is that those women felt safer or better off in a patriarchal culture. They are often women who craved the extra status they get in a patriarchial America, so they wanted a cutthroat alpha male to protect that culture. A ruthless man at the head of a culture can make some women feel safer as they have a fierce defender.

I think the deeper evolutionary purpose of the above developments was to make the shortcomings and problems with the patriarchal, dominance-driven pattern more obvious and to surface the wounds, traumas, and unhealed aspects of our collective psychology that needed to be addressed before we can authentically and fully step into a new pattern of co-equality beyond patriarchy. I like to call this coming phase partnerarchy as it is based in a co-equal contribution between genders, but we can also just call it post-patriarchy. We’re not, I believe, going to swing to a female-centric pole as a culture but we are going to increasingly see a balance of masculine and feminine qualities in our society as the foundation on which a new American era will be grown.

Although many men fear this change, I believe it’s going to be a far better era for men as well for many modern malaises of men, such as suicidality, depression, loneliness and drug abuse, are related to a culture in which other humans (and particularly men) are competitors rather than allies.

Once Trump rode the undercurrent of anger from a base of men losing power to become a viable Republican candidate in the 2016 primary, he then used well-honed alpha dominance tactics to dominate one other contender after another. Whether it was through schoolyard name-calling or lie-filled attacks, he gradually forced the Republican party as a whole to submit to him. The party craved a dominant patriarch and when it witnessed his skill at domination, again and again, the majority of the party capitulated to him and began to rationalize their surrender because he became their ticket to maintain power politically, an existential imperative to survive culturally.

So one by one, they traded their principles, values, and integrity for the power and money that Trump could increasingly distribute as he dominated first the Republican party and then the country as President.

If one sees life as a zero sum game of winners and losers, then many Republicans felt they had no choice but to back the leader of their culture. Or you would become a loser, which risked all sorts of exploitation, loss, and trauma - which Trump was happy to reinforce by going after anyone who challenged him within the party.

The underlying reality is that Republican party hasn’t been just a political party. It has been the standard bearer for a more traditional patriarchal culture that is waning in influence and feels under threat. If you identify with that culture and fear the diminishment of its power (because you fear you will be victimized without adequate power), you back the leader who can demonstrate dominance over the other contenders for cultural leadership.

JD Vance is a clear example of someone who once was a never-Trumper who changed his views as he saw the potential benefits for his own status from backing the alpha. He went from critic to sycophant to VP in order to advance his own ambitions and to advance the power of the Republican party.

If we see all of this through the lens of the collective outworking of the patriarchal pattern in the American psyche, it makes more sense.

Basically, I believe that now is the time that a post-patriarchal America is close to fully emerging. A woman President (whether Hillary or Kamala) would have been an undeniable marker that the patriarchal era was over, which triggered fear in many men (and a lot of women) still living in a patriarchal culture.

Trump’s hyper-masculine candidacies in 2016 and 2024 rallied many young men, wealthy men, and traditional men to defeat the “threat,” along with women who felt more comfortable with an aggressive patriarchal form of leadership.

But here is the catch. Our culture is still shifting inexorably beyond the patriarchal era. Politics is the last and most important hold-out, which is part of why the cultural and political battles have been so hard fought. Trump’s rise didn’t change the cultural shift underneath but it exaggerated the tensions between new and old by demonizing the new and celebrating the old.

Where does that leave us now, on the day of Trump taking office again?

First, I think we have to trust in our hearts that the new era for America is going to emerge at some point. The underpinning shifts in consciousness, the dramatic gains in educational attainment for women, the growing equality in business, and shifts in cultural norms are all moving, inexorably, towards a post-patriarchal culture.

It’s up to us to hold a unifying vision for that culture, a vision in which men truly thrive as well. If the vision is about vanquishing, banishing, or subjugating the old patriarchal pattern (and patriarchs), it’s going to trigger much more violent reactions and existential fears. The vision needs to be inclusive of the gifts and blessings of both men and women, who will hold more equal influence in our society at all levels.

If we hold in our hearts that this is a natural evolutionary process of cultural growth that cannot be stopped, only delayed or diverted for a time, that takes away some of our own edge of fear. It’s not about conquering the previous culture but winning people over to a new way of being that is better for them and better for our world.

Forcing people to do something as a result of shame and social control is part of what led to the backlash against PC and cancel culture. Sovereignty is important and real, deep change of consciousness requires free choice. We have to keep making the future era more magnetic, alluring, and desirable.

Take Taylor Swift, the dominant pop icon of our day. She is her own boss, a masterful artist, a wildly successful entrepreneur and speaks her mind. She is a fully empowered, independent woman whose gifts do not require the support or permission of any man. And she’s the single biggest inspiration to the next generation of girls. You can go down the list in many domains from Simone Biles to Kamala Harris and it’s clear there there are many women role models who are post-patriarchal who are inspiring the next generation of citizens.

These women leaders are not anti-men but can collaborate, partner, and bless men in wonderful ways as well. So their rise is not a zero sum game with men. The men around them do not lose but are lifted as well.

The more we can ground in the reality that the emergent culture WILL prevail in the longer term, it shifts our relationship with the patriarchs who have now seized power in DC and the big-money titans who are forming a largely male oligarchy around Trump.

I want to be clear that they can do an enormous amount of damage in the short-term. The potential to dismantle the checks on power, weaponize government against enemies, and enrich loyalists is real. We may be in for a very dark period in which millions from immigrants to trans people to Democrats are in for an authoritarian dystopia with real suffering. There may be many times we have to stand up and even risk our lives to protect people, institutions, and freedoms.

But that is really all in the category of defense and as important as those things can be, the longer term solutions are not revolutionary but evolutionary. As I have said to one friend, the patriarchy is not going to be overthrown, it is going to be melted.

The attempt to overthrow is always some form of violent resistance. The long game is about collectively healing and maturation which is a slower individual process. And that long game is what ultimately ends the Trump era as the way he leads becomes something that a larger majority of American simply do not support in any way, which will, one way or another, capsize the power his regime develops.

As Trump takes power now, with fewer guardrails and a larger percentage of American elites bowing down to that power, he is going to have the opportunity to demonstrate just why the consciousness he is living in is not adequate to meet the challenges of our day. We can, in the short term, see that only as a dangerous and bad thing. However, if we see it with the long-term view, it may be forcing a maturation of America that is overdue.

We may need this time, as a culture, with Peak Patriarchy on full display and manifesting some truly appalling things, to finally make the decision in the hearts and minds of enough Americans, that it’s time to move forward.

Each act of bullying, each act of revenge, each act of villification, each disrespect for the institutions of our land is going to peel away more people who decide that they really don’t want to be that kind of a country any more.

As a country, I believe that we will eventually want more than to win against other countries (America First), we will want them to thrive as well. As a nation, we will celebrate our immigrants rather than have them cower in fear. As a culture, we will respect the contribution of all Americans (left and right) rather than turn our public discourse into an unending fight for more power.

In short, having Trump in power again can propel America, bit by bit, to outgrow patriarchy.

How long that takes will be up to us. I don’t believe Trump himself is going to change much. He is likely to push the limits of his power as far as the American people and the justice system allow. What will change is the center of gravity of American culture. MAGA supporters will each begin their own process of awakening. Will it be when Trump weaponizes the justice system? Mobilizes troops against American citizens? Creates deportation camps? Or insults people that we care about? Will it be when he allies with Putin in surrendering Ukraine?

While we don’t know what the specific incidents will be, what I think is clear is that Trump will nearly always choose what enriches and empowers himself and those around him. With fewer guardrails that will likely lead us down some dark pathways that America has not yet experienced. He will breach norms, break laws, and much more. Will he jail opponents without due process? How far down the authoritarian path will he go? We don’t know. But what we do know that he has a more fully developed gameplan with a team eager to implement.

So we’re going to get a kind of WWE version of the Presidency: hyper-aggressive, hyper-masculine, and very imbalanced.

This extreme version of patriarchal leadership will show more and more people just how unwise, unhappy, and imbalanced this kind of leadership is, particularly in the modern era with all the global challenges we face.

He will likely get many big businesses and billionaires to cower at his feet. He will likely run some a lot of immigrants out of the country or into deportation camps. He will strike fear into the hearts of many enemies. He will lead many media entities to play it safe.

But he will not be able to break the American spirit that yearns to grow, self-express, and be better versions of ourselves. More and more people will increasingly see that what we want for ourselves, our communities and our leadership is not what he is offering. By embodying past paradigms of leadership in disagreeable ways that create real suffering, he will eventually push more people out of romanticizing that past and towards a more unified future.

Whether that takes 1 year or 4 or even 8 remains to be seen.

That’s why I believe it’s unlikely that we will ever again see an old-school patriarchal President like Trump. He’s like the supernova explosion that comes at the end of a star’s life - a flaring forth of a more exaggerated version of that which we are outgrowing as a culture.

The sheer audacity with which he expresses and embodies that pattern is offensive to the emergent culture and consciousness in a way that will, I believe, lead to long-term strengthening of the emerging culture. As people face him in their inbox, day after day, they will grow stronger in themselves. As Kamala Harris said many times in her campaign, “we’re not going back.” I think that is true culturally, even if it is not now true politically.

He is a kind of anti-hero that pushes us our culture forward.

In psychology there’s a useful term called “repetition compulsion” which helps us understand why people tend to repeat and recreate traumatic experiences from their childhood. It’s ultimately a movement towards wholeness.

On a deep level, we re-create a trauma in present time for the purpose of understanding how to heal and grow beyond it. Instead of avoiding a negative experience entirely, we put ourselves in situations (from relationships to jobs) that re-animate the unhealed pattern.

Psychologically, then, I see the second Trump administration as a kind of repetition compulsion for the traumas of the patriarchal era in America to be surfaced, healed, and ultimately transcended by experiencing them in an exaggerated fashion.

For those who have traumas related to the dominator aspect of the patriarchal culture, he is incredibly activating – an embodiment of a male abuser, oppressor, or exploiter. This tends to generate deep, visceral fear of being dominated and exploited or harmed again.

So now is actually an ideal time to surface, address, and heal all the traumas that we’ve experienced as a result of masculine aggression, which applies to both men and women. Trump’s daily presence in our newsfeeds will catalyze the emergence of fears, traumas, and dormant emotions. If we don’t resist that process, he can be useful to help us surface unhealed patterns and get stronger and more whole, day by day.

Psychologically, this next phase is not simply about fighting and denigrating Trump as a representative of the old culture but transcending that culture more fully and acting as a beacon to those who remain in it, showing that the emergent culture offers a brighter possibility for us all. Even when resistance to immoral actions is required, we can do so in a spirit that elevates the culture, a stance Gandhi demonstrated beautifully in India. His satyagrahas engaged in principled, non-violent resistance that eventually led the British to see the error in their ways.

In short, it’s a time to attract MAGA towards a future they fear but one that nonetheless will be a happier and healthier one for them. This means transcending the bitter partisanship and restraining ourselves from expressing anger, condemnation and fear (while working with those more privately).

We must not, of course, capitulate to the representatives of the old culture, which is actually retraumatizing. We need to take principled stands for the rule of law, institutions and democratic norms. But we also need to stand for a better culture, which also means strengthening ourselves. I think it’s helpful to do that physically (workouts on the next level), emotionally (engaging in more healing practices), intellectually (strengthen our voice and values, and spiritually (grounding in a deeper trust).

There’s a certain amount of resistance to corruption and oppression politically that is going to be required in the time ahead but it should be in the spirit we might embody as parents with a tantruming child. We can be firm in our boundaries and strong in our “no’s without being cruel ourselves.

We need to hold the higher ground but in a way that is calling people forward.

That will help more and more people to peel away from their support of MAGA and Trump, which, in turn, will lessen their power to do real damage. The less actual support they have, the less suffering they will cause.

One of my favorite books is Michael Singer’s The Surrender Experiment in which he takes on a practice of not resisting whatever comes. It liberates him in beautiful ways, even when he faces a multiple-year lawsuit. If we internally accept tha there can be a deeper purpose behind the reality of Trump back in the White House, it may well open us to blessings and possibilities that we didn’t expect, for ourselves and our world.

In closing this very long reflection, I want to affirm that the new paradigm of consciousness that is emergiung is more joyful, hopeful, and liberating than the old. Let us keep creating magic, keep opening our hearts, offering our blessing and our wisdom more widely. Let us release our judgement of MAGA supporters and dissolve our condemnations so that our pathway forward is more enticing to join.

Fear ultimately sabotages our creativity and our life force. Living in a fearful paradigm suppresses the nectar of life. The America we know and love is built on exuberence and opportunity rather than fear.

If we live in fear of the next Trumpian move, we will not embody the future that is coming. In many ways, we need to double down on that which empowers the best us, from deep community to loving partnership to creative self-expression to empowering spiritual practices. If we double down on our life-affirming practices in this era, we will strengthen our ability to weather any storm and we will also hasten the end of the Trump era.

Fear drives us lower in our brainstems and lowers the center of gravity for our consciousness. Fear is a crucial force for aspiring authoritarians to gain more power, situating them as our defender in a dangerous world. But if we don’t succumb to that fear, we can instead become more and more free.

A story of possibility, love, and unity is what will ultimately liberate more of our humanity and lead our culture to become ever more magnetic. Amplifying inspired stories, liberating examples, and new possibilities is at the heart of what we need to cultivate now.

Exuberance dissipates fear. 

Whenever Trump activates us, it’s helpful to see that he’s triggering something that is coming up for healing.  It’s up to each of us to turn to whatever methods most resonate, from talking to friends to therapy to meditation to yoga to journaling.  When we do the work of metabolizing our own traumas, we are contributing to the collective uplift of a new way of being and we even become more effective activists and defenders when those things are required.

Finally, trying to see Trump with some empathy can be helpful.  This may be the hardest part for most of us but when we hate him, we empower him and we prevent the ending of his era.  Ridicule and hatred are internalized by his supporters as evidence that the other side can’t be trusted, which fuels additional energy to try to defeat the enemy. 

Empathy can arise if we see him as a traumatized product of the patriarchal era, cut off from his authentic depths, addicted to attention, constantly fighting, and ultimately lonely in his call to have everyone submit to his power. 

The end of his life will likely be seen through the lens of failure and perhaps even villainy.  While that does not excuse, in any way, the suffering he will have caused others, it can help us to understand him as the creation of a larger societal pattern and to know that there is a kind of suffering underneath.

Since our relationship to Trump is a key signal to MAGA supporters, if we can see him more dispassionately and even with some empathy, it means they may be willing to listen to us a bit more deeply as well. For the MAGA movement to dissolve, they will need to feel that they have an honorable place in the new American pattern that is emerging. They will need to feel and receive empathy even when they have not been able to give it.  And ultimately, they will need to work through their own patriarchal traumas, which have often buried important parts of themselves as well.  It will be a slow process that requires a lot of humanity.

From the highest level, if we see the Trump era as an orchestration of the Divine in order to complete one long era of human history and establish a new pattern for America (and eventually the world), we can see Trump’s behaviors through a different lens. 

His time in power and dominating public discourse will have served our collective awakening, served the growth of more powerful women, and the maturation of more balanced men.  He will, like an abusive boyfriend, create an opportunity for ending the repetition of violent polarization and open a pathway to a more sacred and collaborative destiny. 

None of what has made America great in previous eras will be gone, it will just find a more noble and unifying expression.

Let us all use this time aheaad to remember more of who we are and to stand clear-eyed, open-hearted, and resolute to meet the storms that are coming in the service of the future generations who are depending on us.