On Shame

By Daniel Addison Barkhuff

I have lived long enough to watch the United States fail, sometimes in ways that were distant and abstract, sometimes in ways that felt uncomfortably close, and sometimes in ways that took people I knew.

My first memory of the world beyond my home is the Challenger disaster. I didn’t understand the engineering, or the politics, or even the scale of what had happened. I just remember the white poofs in the sky, on a wheeled-in television to children sitting criss-cross apple sauce. It was my first glimpse that not everything goes as the grown-ups say it will.

The Gulf War came next, half-understood through the television. Kuwait, Iraq, the Persian Gulf: names that meant nothing to me until suddenly they meant a lot. Iran-Contra flickered at the edges of awareness, something about secrecy and betrayal, Oliver North, lying. Even then, a pattern was forming: Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. Oil. Power. Decisions made far away that would echo for decades.

Then came 9/11. Intelligence failures, we would later call them, as if that phrase could hold the weight of what followed. I read the report years later. I found something: a mosaic of missed warnings and human limitations, stitched together into catastrophe. The wars that followed were not abstractions to me. I saw the men who would fight them. I saw them in the Team gym, in ordinary moments before deployment. Then they were gone. Some came back changed. Some didn’t come back at all. Funerals.

There were other failures too: less violent, but failing. A stock market collapse driven by greed dressed up as sophistication. Selling my house for a massive loss. Then Trump, the first time,a shock that felt, to many, like a rupture in something foundational.

COVID too. Over a million Americans dead. Not statistics, people. I saw them die. And what stunned me most was not just the loss, but the indifference that followed. The speed with which we moved on, or refused to look directly at what had happened.

But this moment. Tonight.

My second favorite Hemingway Quote: “It reminded me of certain dinners from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening.”

We choose shame.

I know only that I am ashamed of what we threaten. Ashamed of what we have already chosen. Ashamed, too, of my own limits,of my inability to bend the arc of this country into something worthy of the children I will leave it to.

I tried. I’ve been trying. I failed.

But I am still American. That hasn’t changed. I have given this country the best parts of myself, and I will continue to do so, however modest those parts may be. Loyalty involves tough love, especially when we’re wrong.

And by that standard, I am ashamed of Donald Trump. He embodies the traits I was raised to reject: cowardice, dishonesty, theft of both property and truth. He is not a distortion of the American promise; he is a rejection of it. An apostate, not an heir.

Someday he will be gone. I hope that day comes soon, and naturally. But I will not tell myself the comforting lie that loyalty requires me to accept him, or to share in what he represents. Let others justify it. Let them rationalize what he threatens.

I won’t.

America does not need cowards. And whatever happens next, that is the line I refuse to cross.