Every morning, I take a deep breath and exhale through a full range of emotions. At first, I’m anxious about what may have happened overnight, then angry when I find out. I move through disappointment, then sadness, and—by the time I get ready for bed—I feel resigned. To what, I don’t know. Like you, I’m witnessing—in real time—the strategic dissolution of our good faith attempts to realize liberty and justice for all.
Reflecting on every long-term strategy I’ve ever written, a vivid scene plays out in my mind:
There are multiple consumer profiles on easels around a boardroom. A dozen men sit straight-backed in brown leather chairs with their laptops open and glasses of water to the right. For some, black coffee. The sun is blinding, and the bearded man on the end of the table rolls his chair backwards to the window so he can close the shade. One of the younger men stands to make his pitch. He shares the long-awaited results of his research, and outlines the unique concerns and frustrations of multiple segments of the American population:
“Group A,” he begins, “feels left behind. They’re not succeeding like their parents did. They resent that no one seems to be paying them any attention. They feel overlooked, and we can appeal to their need to feel seen. To be important.”
“People in Group B are angry about being painted as the bad guy. We can appeal to their need to feel honorable. We can promise them we’ll reinstate the moral and organizational authority they freely enjoyed before DEI and cancel culture turned them into enemy number one.” There are vigorous head nods around the table.
“People in Group C are split. Those who consider themselves traditionalists feel judged by those intent on liberation. Those intent on liberation want to be seen as ‘good people’ who fight for what’s right. We can make this playing field so muddy that they fear moving in any direction. We’ll paralyze them, and make the few still fighting look insane.”
The man in the center of the table chuckles, and the others shoot him a knowing smile.
“Group D? Our biggest threat. They’re not only determined and effective mobilizers, but they’re trendsetters. Left unchecked, they’ll bring people along with them. If we go hard after everything they’ve worked for, we can break their spirits. Seed hopelessness. Make them stand down.” They’re all leaning forward now.
In my imagining, there are a few questions in the room. Some lively debate. The newest member of the task force asks for more evidence, and the presenter shares a montage of Americans of all stripes raging against this and that. There is obvious pain and confusion and frustration and fear in their voices, and in their eyes. He explains that an aggressive campaign with a multi-faceted approach can manipulate these emotions to their benefit.
The stout man in the corner who’d been quiet until now, but who was an integral part of developing the plan, pipes in. “If we come at this from all directions,” he says, “we can convince enough American people that DEI is their enemy. Many don’t even know what it means, so our definition will be their anchor. Once we establish the anchor, they’ll not listen to any other explanation. Combined with other tactics, this will keep them busy fighting for sediment. And while people are distracted by the chaos we create in government and the empty threats we throw at the private sector, we’ll execute the plan to grow our wealth and increase our positional power in the world. But we must move with pace.”
It’s an eerie scene, and entirely within reason. Good strategists work with insight. They brainstorm. They identify threats and plan to mitigate them. They resource their plans. They market. They wield language as a light or a sword. They know they must flood the airwaves and that, if they do, their version of the truth will dominate. As someone who began my professional life in product development, I understand that what we’re watching now is by design.
I was mentally prepared for the DEI mind games, but it’s worse than I thought. It doesn’t take a visionary to know that the blind pursuit of power and money and engineered exceptionalism would leave casualties. That all who didn’t fit the unilaterally retraced boundaries of Americanness would be left out, cast aside, erased. But I didn’t expect the path to our unraveling to be so swift, so bold, so sweeping, so unobstructed. It’s disorienting. It makes you doubt what you thought you knew. It also makes you doubt what you thought other people knew.
So, what did I think we knew?
It’s simple, really. I thought we knew that how we treat people who can do nothing for us is a testament to our character. I thought we knew that we reap what we sow. I thought we knew that we are inextricably linked, as Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his Letter to A Birmingham Jail. I thought we knew that God is love—not achievement or pride or control or dehumanization or money or self-proclaimed superiority.
But we don’t appear to know much at all. And to be honest, I’m not sure it matters. We’ve moved beyond sense-making. It’s hard to imagine where we go from here—how we ordinary citizens turn from the self-obsession that led us to cut down those who once stood at our sides and toss them under foot.
In this game of one-uppance, there are no winners. If your fellow human being loses, you lose. And if you’ve been moving through this world believing you are somehow better or more deserving than the next person, for any reason at all, you lost a long time ago. (Even if you’ve gained material things along the way.)
It’s complicated. But here’s what I believe:
I believe the real fight is not about politics or race or age or religion or geography. Not really. I believe these are happening at eye level, and we’re grappling with the reasons we can see and most readily understand.
I believe the true fight—if you want to call it that—is between love and apathy, kindness and cruelty, generosity and greed. I believe that while systems govern so much of how we survive, the condition of the heart dictates how we live. I believe that we are being called from complacency to consult the deepest parts of us—to uncover what is right and true apart from the madness and the mandates and the malice.
I believe that we can and should, especially now, ask ourselves the most important question we may ever ask: Why am I here?
Then, with untamed courage and fierce intentionality—from wherever you are and with whatever you have—BE the answer.
Tara Jaye Frank