I wrote an earlier version of this piece shortly after the start of this horrific regime. The regime has become far more horrific since then — worse than I’d feared.

I mentioned then that a woman I didn’t know was about to pass me on the sidewalk and then stopped, turned toward me, and almost shouted, “It’s a f------ nightmare!”

Well, it has been a “f------ nightmare.”

But a “f------ nightmare” is not all bad if it awakens America.

America is like a sleeping giant whose passion for democracy and social justice is fearless, once awakened.

The giant doesn’t awaken easily, but a nightmare can do it.

Remember how Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized the nation against racial injustice? He let everyone see its horrors. Night after night on television, America saw peaceful Black people getting clubbed and arrested for exercising their rights.

A true nightmare.