Learn the Lesson or Relive the Punishment

Props to @jemartisby

I keep thinking about the original post, the warning tucked inside it like a live wire. One day, when we get through this, we’ll face a choice. Hold people accountable, or rush into reconciliation in the name of unity. And history, with its bleak little smirk, reminds us that we almost always choose the second one. I understand why. Unity feels good. Accountability feels hard. And Americans are nothing if not deeply susceptible to the illusion that if we just stop talking about a wound, the wound will quietly heal itself.

But that instinct is exactly what keeps getting us hurt. It’s what lets the same failures return wearing new suits and fresh slogans. And every time we sprint toward reconciliation without repair, we guarantee that the next fall will be higher, harder, and costlier. That’s the part that gnaws at me. Not the question of whether we will survive this moment, but whether we’ll actually do the work required to make sure we don’t end up here again.

When I look back across our history, I see a repeated pattern of choosing peace over justice and unity over truth, and the bill always arrives decades later with interest. After the Civil War, we embraced reconciliation with the white South so quickly that we abandoned Black Americans to a century of legalized terror. That wasn’t reconciliation. That was capitulation dressed up as magnanimity. After Watergate, we reinstated the presidency without building structural safeguards, which taught future administrations that norms are just polite suggestions. After the Iraq War, we let the architects walk away unwounded because accountability felt too divisive, and the result was a political culture that treats truth as a disposable accessory.

And after January 6, we told ourselves that charging rioters would be enough. We let the larger machinery of the coup attempt remain intact. We didn’t ban the insurrectionists from office. We didn’t reform the Electoral Count Act until far too late. We didn’t codify any of the emergency guardrails that barely held. We didn’t reassert Congress’s role as a check on executive power. And we certainly didn’t rebuild the public’s relationship with truth. We treated accountability as optional, and optional accountability is no accountability at all.

So here we are, again, staring down a moment where the temptation will be to call it all a bad dream and move on. But moving on without repair is exactly how you guarantee the next collapse. And this time, the stakes aren’t theoretical. They’re visible in the cracks already spreading through the republic.

We came inches from disaster more than once. If a handful of state officials hadn’t refused to falsify vote totals, we’d be living in a country where elections are determined by phone calls, not ballots. If courts hadn’t held firm, we’d be living in a country where losing candidates can simply declare victory and let the legal system sort it out. If a few military leaders had made different choices on January 6, we’d be living with the memory of American troops confronting American citizens at the direction of a sitting president. These weren’t hypothetical dangers. These were cliffs we nearly stepped over.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth. Unless we fix the checks and balances that failed, unless we convert norms into law, unless we build institutions that cannot be bent by a single man’s ambition, we will face those cliffs again. Power will always find the weakest part of a structure. Demagogues know exactly where those parts are. And our system, for all its beauty, was built on an assumption of good faith that no longer exists.

We need codified protections for the civil service so no president can hollow out expertise for personal loyalty. We need mandatory ethics constraints for the executive branch so corruption can’t be shrugged off as style. We need clear, enforceable rules for elections so we never again rely on individual courage to save democracy. We need real independence for the Department of Justice. We need legal boundaries around the military so no president can use force against citizens to stay in power. We need Congress to reclaim its authority instead of functioning like a timid adjunct to executive whim.

In other words, we need a republic built for the world as it is, not the world we wish it were. Norms won’t save us. Traditions won’t save us. Honor systems won’t save us because honor is meaningless to the dishonorable.

I say this not from cynicism but from the strange optimism that comes with secular humanism. I believe people can learn. I believe nations can grow. I believe compassion is possible even after cruelty has had its say. And I also believe that real reconciliation requires truth and accountability, otherwise it isn’t reconciliation. It’s denial.

I want unity. I want healing. I want a country that can breathe again. But I don’t want unity built on forgetting. I don’t want healing that leaves rot under the floorboards. And I don’t want a democracy that collapses the next time a man with a taste for power discovers a loophole large enough to walk through.

We owe ourselves better. We owe the next generation better. We have a chance right now, in this moment of exhaustion and clarity, to do something our ancestors rarely managed. We can choose accountability before reconciliation. We can choose structural reform before symbolic harmony. We can choose to remember before we forgive. And if we do, we might finally break this old American pattern of rushing toward peace before we’ve earned it.

Because if we don’t break the pattern, the pattern will break us. And next time, I’m not sure we’ll get another chance to put the pieces back together.

Share this, speak on it, pass it on and talk about it some more. Every citizen needs to internalize this message.