We’re at the point in the America movie where the screenwriter has thrown all pretext of subtlety out the window. This country is about to re-inaugurate a man whose entire campaign was open contempt for laws, humanity, or really anything beyond further enriching and empowering himself. And this time, all of the most powerful and pathetic people in the country are lining up behind him. As a fitting backdrop, Washington, D.C is having record-shattering cold weather on Inauguration Day (everyone mutter “hell’s literally freezing over” together for warmth!). Meanwhile, Los Angeles is still battling its worst wildfires in recent memory, fires that have burned 62 square miles of land, homes, and communities.

Anyone who has read even a two-sentence synopsis of The Parable of the Sower is going out of their minds with all the life imitating art (which was imitating life’s potential). We are beset on all sides. So it makes sense that I am encountering iterations of the phrase “we’ve survived before” again.

I should be clear—due to my constant algorithm pruning and disappearance from Twitter and Facebook, I tend to see the reactions to annoying commentary before I even see the commentary itself. So I see a lot more people saying, for instance, that no, many of us did NOT survive Trump’s first term, or Reagan’s presidency, or any of the other dark times that lefties in America1 typically cite.

“We survived X” is incomplete, regardless of which version it is. What does it mean, for instance, that “we survived Reagan”? Who does “we” refer to? It can’t refer to the nearly 90,000 people who died of AIDS during Reagan’s presidency, especially since he and his administration were so famously unconcerned with those deaths. It can’t refer to the families decimated by death and imprisonment while he and his cronies fabricated myths about “crack babies” to justify harsher sentencing laws. So, in this case, “we” refers to “America” more generally. But that still runs us into trouble.

Reagan narrowed the definition of American, at the expense of the lives and well-being of everyone who fell outside that definition. It took decades for it to feel like that definition could widen again, let alone like it did widen. But even then, even at peak Obama-era optimism, the definition was too limited. Qualifying was too conditional. This is the era, after all, that brought the rallying cry “immigrants: we get the job done,” a motto so immediately heartbreaking in its belief that proof of our productivity was proof of our value, our Americanness.

That belief was ill-founded—our productivity was just proof of what was worth exploiting and plundering to them. The very America we were so anxious to be part of was equally anxious to put us back in our place. Anxious to let us know that the only qualifications it would accept are the same as they ever were—whiteness, maleness, straightness, and wealth2. Obama was a fluke, one that allowed a more diverse group of people to benefit from the proximity to Americanness, at the expense of people we couldn’t and would never see. My point is, even the periods that the average American leftie wouldn’t think to say “we survived” about was something that some communities had to survive. The definition of “we” is always shifting, and always conditional.

But “we survived X” also feels like a truth worth reckoning with. Because there are countless communities that have survived, and are surviving, despite the attempts to eradicate them. I don’t want to reduce any of us to our ability to survive horrors, but I also don’t want to discount that ability.

We have a responsibility to remember everyone who did not survive, and to remember the people who did. Because the people we want to make space for, to protect, and to hold dear right now, include survivors as well as ghosts. Some of us have survived worse. Some of us have survived things that were not worse, but were still horrifying. And many, many, many of us have not survived.

Rather than “we’ve survived worse,” or “immigrants: we get the job done,” I greatly prefer another line from Hamilton: “tomorrow there’ll be more of us.”3 To me, that line encompasses everything I’m trying to say and hold space for, including that there are not enough of us now. But it’s important to me to keep believing that there will be more of us, and for me to put as much of my energy into making that possible as I can. We have a responsibility to survive because so many didn’t, and so many won’t. It’s not just “so many of us have died,” but also “so many of us must live.”

Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this essay, please take a second to share it!