On Friday morning the street was blocked off and children were playing tag on it. The street wraps around a hundred-year-old church and separates its grounds from the surrounding university campus. For the United States a century qualifies a church as old, and though the dome and bell tower imitate the style of a specific time and place they do suggest a certain timelessness. I sat in the university library across the street. In the strong sunlight of the longest day of the year, under a sky cleared by the night’s storm of its usual haze, the strip of grass between the library and the street looked unnaturally, shockingly green. I remembered that it was new. The old lawn was peeled away after student protestors put up tents on it to protest the war in Gaza.

Someone of a certain age said that he was adjusting to the idea of living the rest of his life under an authoritarian government hostile to most of what he holds dear, attached as he is to democracy and the way things used to be. Hearing this blew the lid off a deep well of internal sadness I didn’t even know existed. I was embarrassed by my sadness, because it has been unfashionable to admit to feeling anything about Donald Trump. Also the way things used to be wasn’t especially democratic or just—the students knew that—and who knows how things will be, anyway.

Still I think it matters what kind of government my country has, and I would rather a stated commitment to democracy imperfectly carried out to the absence thereof. (I have in mind a narrow definition of democracy: a system in which “people are free to choose, including to remove, governments.”) I think there is something special about the United States’ founding principles, but not so special that they can save us. Or more to the point, I don’t think that our uniqueness can save us when we’ve chosen to turn our backs on it. A nation of laws not men could maybe outlast one or a few lawless men. We’ve chosen to be something else instead now.

The church, the library. How many churches have seen weeds grow up through stones that men once kissed with lips kept pure for this purpose alone? How many libraries has the world lost since Alexandria burned? A nearby town can only scrape together enough money to keep its library open a few days a week. The children playing in the street were never going to grow up in the country I thought I knew. It passed out of being with my own childhood.

A few days after police officers behind riot shields squared off against the students in their soft-sided tents, a lawn-service truck pulled up and a crew of workers unrolled the new lawn. No tent stakes had ever been hammered into this grass but it was still marked by what had come before. The men who unloaded the big rounds of sod looked like the people being grabbed off American streets by armed men hiding their faces.

Where will everything we know and love endure? In this library, bound and filed away for an unknown future? Across the street, in the church, monastery walls again rising against barbarism outside?

Everything can’t be this freighted with meaning. It’s too much to see in the very blades of grass a menacing reminder of what has happened, is happening, could happen. The lawn is a bunch of plants, the church a collection of stone and glass and color. The library holds the work of countless human lives bound between covers. The books sit on the shelves. We seek for knowledge in our computers now.