Tonight, Donald J. Trump will stand before Congress and deliver what may be the last State of the Union address this country ever hears. Not because the tradition will end, but because the union it’s meant to describe is fraying beyond recognition.
We’ve spent decades turning politics into sport, neighbors into enemies, and the hard work of democracy into a spectacle of outrage. We’ve let tribalism replace citizenship, algorithms replace discourse, and the thrill of domination replace the quiet strength of cooperation. We’ve been warned—by historians, by poets, by our own uneasy consciences—that democracies don’t die in a single blow, but in a thousand small cuts: the normalized lie, the celebrated cruelty, the slow surrender of shared reality.
And now we stand on the brink—not of collapse, but of choice.
We can keep going like this, hurtling toward the cliff’s edge, cheering for our team while the ground gives way beneath us. Or we can finally grow up. We can stop waiting for leaders to save us and start acting like the citizens we claim to be. We can reject the script that says our survival depends on someone else’s destruction. We can remember that the point of a union isn’t to declare winners and losers, but to build a world where we all—all—have a place.
This isn’t about hope. It’s about responsibility. The responsibility to see each other, to demand better, to do the work of repair. The responsibility to be the adults in the room, the stewards of something bigger than ourselves.
The skygods aren’t coming. The cavalry isn’t on the way. There’s just us—imperfect, divided, but still here. Still capable of choosing differently.
Tonight, as the speech begins, we must ask ourselves: What kind of union do we want? The answer won’t come from the podium. It will come from us and what we do next.