WHEN WE WERE LITTLE THERE WERE MONSTERS UNDER OUR BEDS.
Now the monsters are out. The Brett Kavanaugh hearings were just the latest escape, our basest fears running free through once reverent halls.
The events of Sept. 27 will go down in history as one of the most divisive and darkest moments of our ever-fragile democracy. Not because of Kavanaugh per se, but rather our reaction to him. We ripped the scab off our collective festering wound and exposed the worst of ourselves.
But what we lost was bigger than any perceived moral authority. We lost our empathy.
We’ve embraced an every person for themselves, every country for themselves mentality. Our enemies aren’t Democrats or Republicans, Red States or Blue States, the Russians or the Chinese. Our enemy is the “other” — an abstract. The individual replaced by the hive mind.
This country, this experiment gone sideways, was founded on empathy. We put ourselves in others’ shoes — whether immigrants, or asylum seekers, or civil rights activists, or yes, even victims of sexual assault — and we made a nation. We manifested something unique in the world, something to be envied.
We built a society held together by empathy. And then in less than a decade, we broke it. Whether we can rebuild it now becomes the biggest question and greatest challenge of this very young 21st Century.
Yes, when we were little, there were monsters under our beds. Now the monsters are out, and there is nothing we can do to change that.
But this doesn’t mean we can’t defeat them.
Our monsters used to make us stronger. So get stronger.
Our monsters forced us to be be brave. So be brave.
In times of trouble you need to tear off the covers and hurl your light into the darkness.
Destroy the monsters once and for all – not with violence, but with hope. Not with anger, but with action. Not with with selfishness, but with empathy.
Monsters are always looking for a fight. But the monsters also have a weakness, one thing they never expect.
Someone to fight back.
Gary Goldhammer -- Strategic storytelling for brands, organizations and executives 
Excellent! Thank you GG!
Awesome, as always! Thanks Gary!
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History, the birth of our nation, immigrants, that is where we come from, both in spirit and in mind. What is lost is the where. When I see Americans deny their heritage and their roots, I see a nation much like you describe, one that forgets who they were and one that becomes “make America great again”. A mantra spoken by the most non of non-americans, the ones that have lost themselves.