Sherod and I sat out on the deck Sherod made last year and ate a dinner with food we’ve already been able to harvest from the vegetable garden. It wasn’t fancy fare, but it was fresh and delicious. The light was gorgeous, and the hummingbirds are back from their migration south for the winter.

The beauty and peace of our lovely home was in stark contrast with the news of Comey’s firing as FBI Director on the heels of some pretty frightening testimony yesterday about the connection between Flynn and the Russian government. Most of us will be able to get up tomorrow and life will not be very different from what it was today before the news broke. But we normalize and minimize the seriousness of the attacks on transparency, the press, the judicial, and now the leadership of the FBI, that are critical to our protections as a democracy at our own peril. It will take all of us to make sure that there is a fundamental level of integrity, transparency and honesty at the highest levels of government. Who will we be?