My grandparents stared out the window of their fourth-story apartment, looking down on the streets of Budapest. Blood still stained the pavement. Bouquets marked the places where the dead had fallen. Bullet holes pockmarked the buildings. The air hung heavy
with the smell of smashed hope.

It was 1956. The Iron Curtain was rising. The Soviets were sealing borders, erecting
walls to trap citizens. My grandparents faced a choice: flee now or risk never seeing
their son again.

Their only child - my father - had escaped five years earlier. They had already lived
through Nazi and Soviet occupations. They’d huddled in basements while bullets rained
overhead, watched friends disappear, and had seen neighbors turn on each other.
When students rose up in protest, they dared to hope. But the tanks rolled in. The
students fell. It became clear: no one was coming. Not America. Not the West. Not
anyone.

They didn’t leave for safety. Safety was long gone. They left for love, for the hope of
reunion. Whatever unknowns lay ahead, they refused to die on one side of the world
while their son lived on the other.

This choice shaped our family’s understanding of freedom, belonging, and the price of
authoritarianism. It also shaped mine.

My father embraced America’s melting pot with pride, believing assimilation was the
price of inclusion. My grandfather, once a prominent surgeon, gave up his status and
rebuilt his life. For him, the transplant was taken. My grandmother, however, mourned.
She missed her family and friends, but also grieved a culture slipping through her
fingers. She came to believe that sameness was safety, and that difference was
dangerous.

In a very different time and place, I was able to choose my own path. I married outside
my race and raised two multiracial daughters in Marin. Where my grandmother saw risk
in difference, I discovered richness. Where she feared otherness, I found connection.
It hasn’t always been easy. Bridging difference is messy. But in those moments when
we stretch to understand one another, a new perspective opens. A possibility we hadn’t
seen before. A future we might choose together.

This isn’t just my family’s story. It’s America’s. And right now, fascist rhetoric is
dominating political discourse on the MAGA far right. Old hatreds are being repackaged
as patriotism. Authoritarianism is being marketed as strength. History is repeating itself
in real time.

We attorneys must defend the rule of law, certainly, but the judicial branch is not merely
a system of rules. It’s the promise that no one is above those rules, and that everyone
belongs under their protection. When we take a stand for the rule of law, we stand for
each other, our community. Our people. All of us, A Nation United. As the son of
immigrants, my own understanding of what America stands for perhaps. Seems like
yours too.

Real democracy isn’t built on sameness. It’s built on the radical act of choosing to stay
at the table, especially when we don’t agree. It’s built on the idea that we can be
different and still belong to one another.

The questions in front of us now are these: What do we choose, and who do we
become when we choose each other?