It is hard to wake up from a nightmare when you were never asleep to begin with.
I fight denial every day. My mind keeps reaching for the escape hatch—this can’t be real, this has to end, this is temporary. But it isn’t a dream. It isn’t temporary. This is real. We are living in the upside down, and the ground beneath us is still giving way.
One hellacious year is behind us. At least three more loom ahead. And I know—deep down, with a certainty that makes my stomach turn—that things in the United States are going to get far worse before there is even the slightest chance they get better.