In fall 2016, I said to a friend, “I don’t know who has it worse—the people who understand what is going to happen, or the people who don’t.”
Her answer was simple: “Neither of them: it’s the kids.”
For the past four years, I have been taking my children on road trips around America, in the event of its demise. This compulsion began in September 2016, when I became certain that American authoritarianism loomed. National landmarks that I had long taken for granted seemed newly vulnerable to destruction or desecration. It was important to me that my kids see America with their own eyes, and not through mine. I want my children to have their own memories of the United States, so that if they’re confronted with a false version years from now, they can say, “No, I saw it. We had that. This was real. That America was real.”
I began driving my children to historical sites in Missouri and Illinois whenever I could. I wanted them to see the sites of our states alongside other Americans who, whatever our political differences may be, wanted their kids to see them too. I took my children to the Dred Scott courthouse in St. Louis where the rights of slaves were debated; to the estate of Ulysses S. Grant and his slave quarters; to the Trail of Tears State Park in southern Missouri commemorating the deaths of Native Americans; to the rural Missouri homestead of Daniel Boone, the frontiersman and slave owner; to the tomb of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois. My youngest did not understand; my oldest knew enough to recognize the incongruity between virtue and cruelty. How could political leaders betray what were supposed to be national values? How could brutal practices be embraced by ordinary Americans?
Or, as she put it, “Why did no one stop people from doing bad things?”
The answer you’re supposed to give to children—one I heard myself as a child—is “That’s just the way things were.” You’re supposed to say, “Lots of good people owned slaves,” or, “It was legal then.” You’re supposed to pretend that historic injustices have either been resolved or that they were never that bad, that they didn’t linger and structure the politics of the present. You’re supposed to normalize cruelty, and in doing so exonerate those who practiced it.
But as I tried to answer her question, my mind flashed forward to what my children might be asking thirty years from now, when their own children are trying to figure out what happened to America. How did a president commit impeachable offenses on a weekly basis—refusing to divest from his businesses, abusing private citizens and migrants, obstructing justice—without facing consequences? How did mafia associates infiltrate US institutions right under the nose of federal officials? How did white supremacist groups rise from the shadows into the spotlight, countenanced by the president and his advisers? How could a politician show more respect to foreign dictators than to US veterans and civil rights leaders, yet still be treated as legitimate by his party?
There is no “That’s just the way things were” to answer the question of what happened to the United States of America. It’s “That’s the way things became,” as a transnational crime syndicate took the place of government. There is a difference between institutions weakening, as they did throughout the wars and recessions of the twenty-first century, and the institutions that protect freedom and national security being hijacked or gutted by hostile, anti-American actors. US history is beset with partisan divides and corruption, but we have never been ruled by a man whose only loyalty beyond himself is to an authoritarian foreign power.
I don’t know what my children will remember of the America I have shown them. I am trying to teach them while I can, so they will know the difference between a deeply flawed democracy and a country that ceases to be a democracy at all. They know that practices like slavery that were accepted as “normal” in US history are today considered an abomination, and that rationalizing cruelty was what allowed them to last for so long. I told them to never consider cruel policies as normal, no matter what politicians and pundits tell them.
I am trying to show them our country was always vulnerable, always flawed, but that people fought back. We’ve survived as long as we have due to self-criticism and sacrifice, a willingness to examine our faults and try to fix them. In the past, we survived because good Americans answered the question “Why does nobody stop people from doing bad things?” with laws and actions that prevented people from doing them. If we survive the current era, it will not be due to a savior from above, but to the refusal of ordinary people to accept elite criminal impunity as normal.
When my family and I get the chance to travel outside Missouri, like many Midwestern families, we drive. There is nothing I love more than being on the open road; if I had the choice, this is all I would do. In the Midwest, distance is measured in time, not miles. Three hours to a destination and back is a nice day trip; a fifteen-hour haul is “doable.” This mind-set is alien to those in crowded coastal regions, whose highways are glutted with traffic and unpleasant to drive. I don’t blame people there for choosing to fly over us, but they are missing out. When your trip begins in Missouri, you can see America from every direction.
My children have never left the United States—leaving is an unfathomable luxury that will hopefully not become a sudden necessity—but they have seen, in ways big and small, the determination and tragedies of our diverse population. They have been to Native American reservations in Oklahoma and South Dakota, and heard Cherokee and Lakota spoken by members of tribes. They have seen the house where Martin Luther King Jr. lived in Montgomery, Alabama, and the bomb crater on its porch, and heard the tapes of him refusing to abandon his cause. They have seen the sites of the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts, and learned how paranoid misogyny and mob mentality culminated in death and shame. They have seen centuries-old churches in Santa Fe and were fascinated, in New Mexico, to hear more people speaking Spanish than English—and were amazed to discover the Spanish-speakers were there before the English speakers. They have been to the oldest mosque in America, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where they were given Ramadan candy by a welcoming imam.
They have been to countless cities and small towns in the South and Southwest and Midwest and Great Plains. Their favorite state to visit is Texas, because so many of the restaurants and storefronts are covered in Texas-themed objects and Texas-shaped items, just in case you forget for one second that you’re in the amazing state of Texas. Their cousins live in suburban Dallas, their grandparents live in rural Wisconsin, their other grandparents live in a city in central Connecticut, and we drive hours on end to see them, watching the landscapes and cultures transform along the way, punctuated with a steadfast tawdriness that makes every place feel like home: the truck stop megaplazas, the “world’s largest object” tourist traps, the ubiquity of giant American flags, which in our violent era usually fly at half-staff.
We have met a lot of interesting people and heard a lot of strange things. My kids don’t find any person out of the ordinary in America because they know there is no archetypal American. When I explain that there is an ongoing debate in the media about which Americans are “real Americans,” they are confused. When I explain that this facile debate has spilled over into government, with Trump challenging the American-ness of different ethnic groups, they are horrified.
My kids have been dragged to more presidential museums and libraries than they wanted to see: Harry Truman, Abraham Lincoln, George W. Bush, Lyndon B. Johnson, and poor Gerald Ford, who was so boring that I had to tell the kids he was an undercover wizard and encouraged them to scour his museum for “magic clues.” (I realized years later while reading a first-grade writing assignment that I had not corrected this myth.) They roll their eyes but absorb the information, as well as the disparity between then and now. I don’t need to spell out the rupture between every past US president and Trump. It is evident in every museum and national monument we visit, even though so many of the problems we face today—systemic racism, economic decline, foreign aggression—are the same as before.
In 2018, we visited the Dwight Eisenhower museum and tomb in Abilene, Kansas. Engraved on its wall is a quote from his 1953 speech “The Chance for Peace.” It says: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
I don’t get sentimental about presidents. As a rule, I oppose making heroes out of public servants. But the vast gulf between the present and the era of Eisenhower’s speech hurts, not because our problems are so different but because our leaders have so profoundly failed us. We live in Eisenhower’s nightmare realized. “This is not a way of life at all” could be the motto of our time. My son was impressed by the giant statue of Eisenhower that stands in front of the museum. He was surprised, and touched, that surrounding it was a plea for peace from a man who was a general.
Since Trump was elected, all of our vacations have been at national parks, sites of awe that I share with my children and sorrow that I keep to myself. In January 2017, Trump declared war on the national parks, resulting in a number of “rogue national park” Twitter accounts from which park employees tweeted out information about now forbidden topics like climate change.1 This was one of Trump’s first aggressive moves against an administrative body, and it struck me as profoundly dangerous. National parks are among the few things nearly all Americans think are a good idea, so the attack was an early sign that the public had little leverage over policy. The attack on the parks also signaled a broader attack on the environment and on cultural preservation, which became blatant when Trump called for a mass reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, two wonders that are also sacred Native American sites.
In March 2017, my family drove west to New Mexico. My children saw the mountains and desert for the first time, and I tried not to cry when they talked about wanting to return and see the same landscapes on their own when they are grown. One morning we woke up early to go sledding on the dunes at White Sands National Monument. We were the only people there. I remember sitting on top of the white crystal sand, with no sound but my children laughing as they sped down the hillsides, thinking that I would never have a happier moment than this, because my gratitude that I could still show my children a place this beautiful was so profound. I felt the same overwhelming emotion, gratitude interlaced with grief, when we took the kids to Colorado and Utah a year later, where they saw the Rocky Mountains and Arches and Canyonlands and Mesa Verde; and the year after that, when we saw Yellowstone and Glacier and Grand Teton and Theodore Roosevelt National Parks. We still had the freedom to travel, and there is so much to see.
Every day since 2016 has felt like a clock ticking down—for every one of us and for America as a country. Climate change has exacerbated the pressure, as fires burn and waters rise. As I write this, Missouri is flooded, and no one is intervening except citizens, who construct sandbags from scratch, trying to keep the rivers at bay before they swallow whole what’s left of our landscape. I spend evenings watching otherworldly sunsets caused by forest fires in Alberta reflect on the floodwaters covering the St. Louis streets.
There is a fragility to life now that nearly breaks me, one I could handle as a child and as an adult but not as a mother. Children force you to envision the future, and doing that today is an act of mental violence. But children also force you to fight for the future—to insist that there will be one, to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice through sheer force of will, because it sure as hell doesn’t bend that way on its own.
I have tried to prepare my children for the future by showing them America firsthand, the horrors and the resilience, the diversity of regions and people. Part of me feels most at home on the road, part of me has always wanted to run away without leaving, and America has always offered respite for the restless. But another part of me is inoculating my children against future propaganda: fake memories marketed as memes, fake archives duplicated by algorithm, false assurances uttered by everyone.
I want them to remember this country, and that I loved it despite its flaws, that it was part of me, and in turn part of them. It is our heritage and our responsibility. I want them to know that I fought for it in the only way I knew how: by telling the truth. But I don’t want them to parrot my views or anyone else’s. I want them to learn and think for themselves. I want them to see their homeland firsthand and draw their own conclusions. To paraphrase George Orwell, those who control the past control the future. I want my children to see the American past before it is gone.
I don’t expect to see peace in my time. I expect a continued erosion of freedom coupled with horrific shifts in our environmental climate and our national law. I expect surveillance culture will exacerbate fear to the point that submission is no longer recognizable as such; it will just be called life. I expect elite criminal impunity to prosper so long as officials refuse to enforce accountability. I expect recessions and censorship and violence.
But there is a difference between expecting an American autocracy and accepting it, and I refuse to accept it. Every loss we endure is a reminder of the gifts we still hold, and of our obligation to fight for a better future for the next generation. I will never settle. I want to settle the score.