What We Do is What We Are

I am an American. Born in the state of California. Lived my entire life in this country, and will almost certainly die here. I have never worn the uniform of any service, but would not hesitate to defend our shores if asked. I love this nation; its people, its flaws, its history and its promise; a promise that has been in danger in the past, from both within and without, but never from within the very office of the man tasked with leading this nation that I love.

Harry Truman was President on the day I was born. When I was three, Dwight Eisenhower took the office. Two more men would follow before I reached the age to vote.

Nine months after my twelfth birthday, I sat across from my father in a booth in the steakhouse at the Stockmen’s Hotel in Elko, Nevada, and watched John Kennedy on a Philco TV mounted behind the bar order U.S. warships to blockade Cuba and board Russian freighters. A year and a month later, I watched the classroom Magnavox from the third row of Mr. Halterman’s Social Studies class as that same President rode through the streets of Dallas.

I enlisted in the neighborhood youth brigades of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and watched as older friends shipped off to the ‘Nam when he escalated the war there. Then I watched as thousands marched through the streets of Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention in ’68, after he’d told us all he would not seek reelection.

I paid scant attention when Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey, and sat slack-jawed with most of the rest of the country when he turned on the steps up the State Chopper, and flashed those V signs with both hands; forced out of the office, the House, and the city on a rail of utter and complete shame. Then sat dumbfounded when his former Vice President announced his complete and unconditional pardon.

I idled in gas lines on ‘F’ days, when Jimmy Carter addressed us in a cable-knit sweater, and said we were running out of fuel. And I watched as the Ayatollah ransacked the Iranian Embassy and held Americans hostage on his watch.

I was on the road doing the coffee house circuit when Nixon ordered troops into Kent State University, and the Quad ran red with blood. And I watched with millions as Reagan fell from the same bullets that took Jim Brady down and eventually took his life.

I gained from William Jefferson Clinton’s economic policies then lost all I’d invested in him when he asked us to define “is”.

I was cutting video for a music video house in Nashville when George H.W. unleashed Desert Storm and liberated Kuwait, and stood rooted to the floor when his son climbed through a pile of rubble that had once been the World Trade Center and held our flag aloft; proud of the vote I’d given him. Then watched, incredulous, as the death toll rose after he flew onto the Abraham Lincoln and told us all that the mission was accomplished.

I watched, uncertain and unmoved as Barack Obama accepted the nomination, the country reeling from the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, then I drove through the streets of West Hollywood in November, barely crawling down San Vicente on the night he changed the country’s history.

Each one of these men showed that Presidents are far from perfect; that human fallibility is precisely what makes us…human. Regardless of your station in life.

Save for one, each also evinced a very real, innate ability to lead. To govern. Each had an intuitive grasp of America’s place on the world’s stage, and the importance of long-held alliances, promises made, and oaths sworn. And save for two, each in their turn gave us the one thing every president should give us: a reason to be inspired. To be confident in the strength and goodness of America, and hopeful of the future that lay ahead in that shining city on the hill.

Donald Trump has brought none of those traits to this office. He has cheapened it, brought shame and dishonor not just to the office, but to this country I love. He is eroding the very foundations of what made America great long before he appropriated the phrase, and turning the very people he is sworn to unite against one another.

His election was a foregone conclusion; as brilliant a display of strategic gaslighting as the world has likely ever seen. Convincing millions of people, including many of my closest friends, that our national salvation lay in his hands alone. A gaslighting lit and driven by a last, terrible gasp of a great hulking swath of America that still sees societal and cultural evolution through the same prism as those who put John Scopes on trial in 1925.

We cannot let this erosion continue…and while I know that I risk losing the connection to many I call friends, I cannot stay silent any longer.

We can and must do better.

@2026 JBuck Ford