The Great American Forgetting Project starts today. They're going to simultaneously try to tell us the last four years were an aberration that is over, and that it never happened.

And it's natural to want to forget these awful years.

It's our moral duty not to.

Those who benefit from our country's malicious priorities will do everything they can now to get us to forget how incontrovertibly Trump exposed those priorities.

Many of us thought we were something better than we were, but now we know.

We've seen our nation's face.

And many among us knew the truth all along. Many of us always saw our nation unmasked, because they were the ones who suffered it.

They told us all along, and the rest of us didn't listen.

Now that they've been proven correct, we're going to be asked to not listen again.

We can't deny anymore, that there are people among us, everywhere, for whom no lie is so obvious they won't believe it, as long as they think it serves their ends.

They don't care about truth, and never did.

We should care about truth, and speak it plain.

This is us.

We've seen our national tolerance for open racism, for cruelty, for corruption, for false equivocation.

Not just the tolerance, but the enthusiasm.

Trump didn't create it. It was there. He exploited it.

We'll never become what we want to be if we don't admit what we are.

We know our police forces are infected with white supremacists and wage constant war against our most marginalized citizens.

We know just how much tolerance for brutality there is among. Not just tolerance—but enthusiasm.

Trump didn't create it. It was there. He exploited it.

We know that open white supremacy can run for high office and win, and receive the unwavering support of its political establishment.

We know our Evangelical Christian churches can be counted on to be the enthusiastic, loyal, sustaining energizing force behind that movement.

We know that nothing can shake that support to supremacy—no scandal no matter how unsavory, no betrayal of national security no matter how dire, no incompetency no matter how embarrassing, not even a deliberately and systemically orchestrated pile of a half-million corpses.

And now, we are going to be asked to forget—chided, at first, for remembering; mocked, eventually, as "clinging to the past" for the crime of understanding our present.

But we know now, and we can't unknow.

We can't become what we hope to be if we won't admit what we are.

And Donald Trump didn't create any of this.

It was already there. It's been there the whole time. He just picked it up.

To some degree at least, he's putting it down now.

It's still there.

We'll be asked to put all this horror on a single grotesque and cruel man, for the purpose of exonerating those who cheered for him louder the more grotesque and cruel he got, and the systems of power that seemed optimized for him, were unable to stop him, and rarely even tried.

And then we'll be asked to never mention him again, to forget the lessons he taught us.

To look forward, not back—not for sake of forward-thinking, but so that needed changes to our malicious priorities, which might prevent the next him, might be kept always in the vague future.

And we'll hear that this is not who we are, and that we're better than that, and we'll be asked to believe it.

But we can't become what we hope to be if we won't admit what we are.

Never forget.