It was an impulse that remained with me through the very dark years of my early adulthood. It remained even during the War on Terror years where, first as a college student and then for ten years as a journalist, I saw the terrible wrath of the place, saw it obliterate hundreds of thousands of people with names and ethnicity and religion like mine, knew for certain that there were deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing called “the free world.” And yet I believed the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable. Until the fall of 2023. Until the
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