Coffee’s still warm, the republic less so, but let’s try anyway.

We built a house of voices,
each room painted a different truth,
and then we forgot
how to walk the hallway without shouting.

On one side, flags folded like prayers.
On the other, prayers folded into arguments.
Hands clenched around books,
some leather-bound, some glowing blue and
each insisting they contain the last clean sentence
God or history ever wrote.

We learned early
how to point.
Index fingers are easy muscles.
They grow strong in childhood,
practiced across dinner tables,
across screens,
across borders we pretend are moral.

But mirrors
mirrors take work.

My mother’s voice still lives somewhere behind my ribs.
Not political. Not holy.
Just tired and precise.

“Look at yourself.”
Not in anger.
In disappointment’s softest register.

The kind that makes a child’s throat close
before the tears even know their cue.

We were all taught the same rule,
no matter the sermon or the slogan.

Don’t hit first.
Don’t steal what you’d mourn losing.
Don’t make someone small
just to feel tall.

Somewhere along the way
we outsourced that rule
to institutions,
then blamed them when it came back broken.

The farmer and the professor
kneel on the same bad floor
when the storm takes the roof.

The protester and the pastor
bleed the same color
when the sirens get it wrong.

Grief does not check party registration.
Love does not require doctrinal footnotes.
And the dead,
the dead are heartbreakingly bipartisan.

If you listen closely,
beneath the chants, beneath the hymns,
you can still hear it.

A shared, trembling hope
that someone, somewhere,
will be gentle
when it matters most.

So, here is the mirror.
No cracks. No slogans. No escape clauses.

Just your face.
Tired. Earnest. Afraid of being foolish for caring.

Treat that face
the way you wish the world had treated you
on your worst day.

Then turn,
slowly,
and offer the same mercy
to the stranger who scares you.

That’s it.
No victory.
No conversion.

Just the quiet, radical act
our mothers begged us not to forget.

“Be kind.
Even now.
Especially now.”

And if your eyes sting a little
at the end of this,
good.

That means something human
survived the argument.