Photo by Frank Higgins, at the Barbara Kruger’s text installation at the Hirshhorn Museum

I feel sick reading the daily headlines. I know I’m not alone. It’s a firehose of assaults on our democratic system. Is my country falling apart? It feels like it.

The chaotic mess of cruelty, incompetence and disregard for the rule of law coming from my government is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Legal scholar Samuel Issacharoff in the Chicago Sun-Times writes an opinion piece about the legal jeopardy of a poorly trained federal armed force. What concerns many Americans is that ICE agents operate in their communities without answering to local police or local officials. They have shot at least 21 people, killing eight, including three Americans.

And what about those facilities (concentration camps!) filled beyond capacity with immigrants who are denied healthcare and legal representation? Immigrant children appearing in court with no lawyer to represent them? The list of heinous offenses is long.

I often wonder if we’ve arrived at our present condition because “we the people” have unfinished business. Howard Zinn writes about our past injustices in his unsparing book, A People’s History of the United States.

My favorite American historian Heather Cox Richardson, whom I enjoy listening to every Tuesday and Thursday evening because she brings a historian’s long view to the news, reminds us we’ve made it through existential challenges equal to the present. Richardson points out to her followers how difficult it was for the colonies to free themselves from English rule. It took a civil war to end slavery. After generations of struggle, women and African Americans won the right to vote.

And yet for all those achievements, I question if we as a country have reconciled with the fact that we live on stolen land, with wealth built on the labor of enslaved people, in a democracy that long denied many citizens the vote.

Is there a reckoning due? And what would such a reckoning produce?

Proposals that have been raised include truth commissions, reparations studies, and the return of public land to tribes. But even small steps would be a meaningful start, such as public displays honoring the Native nations who once lived here, a national scholarship program for African American students to attend university or trade school, and a federal voting holiday.

These questions matter because we are repeating the past, drawing lines around who counts as one of “we the people.” The people crowded into detention camps are treated as if they don’t fully count, just like the Native nations pushed off their land, the enslaved people whose labor built our wealth, and the citizens denied the vote. Maybe our history is returning to us.

This is the first in a series of reflections on America’s reckoning with its past. In upcoming posts, I’ll write about spending the Fourth of July in Washington, D.C., visiting the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, and touring the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago