The majority of Americans did not want the Court to overturn Roe. They don’t want to be surrounded by guns. They are deeply worried about climate change. With these Supreme Court rulings, the law of the land no longer reflects the will of the people who live here.

I am struggling terribly with this reality. I have staked my entire worldview on the belief that people are mostly good, even when we don’t agree with one another, but I find myself now fighting a raging internal battle not to hate everyone whose decisions, large and small, have led to this political moment.

I try to remind myself that Americans have always had reason to despair, to suspect that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was overly hopeful when he told us that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. And then I remember all the times when this wild, unstoppable, unwarranted hope — hope that motivated millions of people to log numberless hours of painstaking work — managed somehow to yield previously unthinkable triumphs.