I was deeply sad and afraid after listening to—I’m tempted to say ambush, but let’s call it—the special meeting between President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Little Marco Rubio, who was trying to disappear into his chair, assorted handpicked press, and the ambushee and begger, Ukrainian President Zelensky for the third time, I was sad more than angry. And I was disappointed. I was disappointed in my country, the country I thought I was too cynical to become disappointed in anymore. and disappointed in myself for being part of our country’s fall from grace.

Now, sitting at my keyboard on a beautiful but cold spring day, I am still sad. Maybe I was not cynical enough or maybe Trump is just being open about who we, The United States of America, really are. I am beginning to realize that Trump’s America is the real America, and that makes me deeply sad.

In 1991, Ukraine was the third largest nuclear power in the world. By 1994, Ukraine had no nukes; they had given them away for a guarantee that Russia, Great Britain, and the United States would protect them. It was called the Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances. Russia was the first signer to break the Agreement when they invaded Crimea and part of Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Great Britain and the US, under President Obama, were next to break the Agreement when they didn’t protect Ukraine as promised (although we did instigate some sanctions against Russia).

Without going deep into the details, most of which I don’t know, by the time Joe Biden took office, Congress had voted some military aid to Ukraine. We increased that in 2022 by about $67B, in 2023 by $47B, and $61B in 2024. President Biden said “We are with you as long as it takes”, however, he refused to define “it”, for some reason not known to me, considering an undefined “it” a sign of good diplomacy. To quote U.S. Lieutenant General Ben Hodges “These statements that ‘we are with you for as long as it takes’ mean nothing to me.” We don’t want Russia to disappear Ukraine, but, seemingly, we also don’t want Ukraine to win the war, even though we carefully didn’t say that.

Now Trump has said we don’t want Ukraine to win. Well, Trump may not have said it, but he has certainly strongly implied it. All this preamble has led me to the realization that our actual reality will never match our shared, professed reality. I still believed that our shared, professed reality was a shared dream if not a reality. Now I am sad that we, much of the majority of our collective we anyway, really do not want our actual reality to ever match that professed reality.

I first realized we were not who we said we were when I was about 17, or 18, or 19, when I read Hiroshima by John Hersey. About the same time, we had a Black housekeeper, Cary, who cleaned our house every couple of weeks. One day, on her way to our place, her car was hit by a couple of young kids going the wrong way down a one-way street. The police were called and gave Cary a ticket. I wanted to fight the ticket, but we didn’t, we paid for the ticket and the damage to Cary’s car in a sort of “don’t make waves” way.

Sitting here, I remember that there were other clues, clubs we couldn’t join, hotels we couldn’t stay in because we were Jewish, cousins who were harassed by HUAC for essentially nothing, being treated as different when I changed schools in the seventh grade. I grew up being taught that White Europeans first brought civilization to California with the Missions; and the Jewish Holocaust survivors who had taken over Palestine and who were making the desert bloom. I was taught that we saved the world – for freedom and Democracy – in World War II.

I was not taught that the Missions were essentially slave camps that the Indians themselves were forced to build, or that Palestinians even existed, or that, months before the Atomic bomb, we set Tokyo on fire. I was not taught that the Tokyo firebombing was planned to kill as many people as possible, and that we set the record for the number of human beings killed by other human beings in one day.

But I was taught, OK, we’re not perfect but we are getting better. And we were. I could see it with my own eyes. What I didn’t see was that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, by far. What I didn’t see was the minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour as if anybody could live on that. But, even when I did, I believed that we aspired to be more perfect. More perfect in our acceptance of other people, more perfect in our national treatment of people, more perfect in acting out the Ideals we say we believe in. More perfect in acting in accordance with The Christ’s teachings. And all that’s true for the people in my life even though very few of them are Christians. It is true in the books, magazines, and papers I read, and the people I see on television or Instagram.

But that is what I believe, not what many Americans believe. We blame Trump, but it is not just Trump. That makes me deeply sad.