Prelude
I am publishing a four-part series to highlight our 250th anniversary, Each article stands alone, but together they will tell a larger story about our American experiment and reinforce the themes of American democracy, especially in the midst of the damage to our country as described in The Trump Files.
Here is the list of four blog posts whiich will be published here over the next four days.
- Wolf Blitzer’s Powerful Reminder of American Citizenship
- The Birthday That Should Have United America
- What Skyler Fusaro Mightr Say About the 250th Anniversary of Our Country
- Rooted in Silence: My Family’s Legacy of Immigration, Adoption and Identity
This is the third post. Enjoy.
First, Who is Skyler Fusaro
As I continue to write on my blog and on Substact, I am bringing fiction into what is essentially a nonfiction narrative that I began in 2005 and published as The Mud Creek Chronicles. I am using fiction through the letters I periodically receive letters from a person living in Atlanta in the late 2060s. Atlanta has been my home since 1969 when I was offered a professorship at Georgia State University.
I will also reach into the past using fiction and nonfiction to highlight and create historical examples relevant to our lives today. Digging into the past is not passive; it’s an inheritance that comes with obligations.
Skyler flips the axis. Instead of reaching back, the she reaches forward, speaking from the 2060s. Future letters are always cautionary. They are shaped by what we might refuse to confront today. When we reach back we ask “What did we inherit?”, Skyler asks “What will we leave behind?”
The future is built from the political habits we normalize now. Skyler’s world is scarred by democratic fractures—Trump’s 2024 election victory, scapegoating, immigration deportation, ICE’s urban repression, and the slow erosion of federal legitimacy.
If we treat creeping authoritarianism as ordinary, we gift later generations a crisis they didn’t choose. The emotional cost of inherited dysfunction.
Skyler’s letters aren’t just political; they’re personal. They show how a damaged civic culture warps childhood, adulthood, community life. She insists that we learn that futures don’t collapse overnight; they fray, and that fraying becomes daily reality for real people.
Skyler Fusaro
People often ask me whether Skyler Fusaro is a real person.
The answer is both simple and complicated. Skyler is a fictional character, but the questions she asks, the fears she confronts, and the hopes she expresses are very real. She grew up and now lives in Atlanta. Skyler writes from the 2060s and 2070s and pens letters about a world that emerged from the choices we are making today.
I first imagined Skyler in 2011 as a way to step outside the relentless urgency of the present. Every day we are flooded with breaking news, political conflict, climate disasters, technological disruption, and endless arguments about what is happening and who is to blame. It is difficult to see where any of it is leading. Skyler gives me a way to look back at our time from the future and ask a different question: What will matter fifty years from now?
Skyler Fusaro Letters Project
The Skyler Fusaro Letters Project is a collection of essays, reflections, and imagined correspondence written from that future perspective. Skyler is not a prophet. She does not predict the future. Instead, she examines the consequences of decisions that were made decades earlier and traces how they shaped the world she inherited.
Atlanta plays a central role in Skyler’s story. The city serves as both her home and her lens on America. Throughout the twenty-first century, Atlanta became one of the nation’s most important crossroads—a place where questions of race, democracy, migration, economic inequality, education, technology, and climate resilience intersected. From Atlanta, Skyler observes a changing South and a changing nation. The city’s history of civil rights activism, political organizing, cultural creativity, and rapid growth provides a backdrop for understanding the larger struggles of American democracy.
Many of Skyler’s letters explore what happens when democratic institutions come under stress. She writes about periods of political extremism, the erosion of public trust, attacks on voting rights, and the temptation to trade freedom for security. Looking backward from the 2060s, she asks how Americans responded when democracy itself seemed uncertain. Which choices strengthened democratic life? Which weakened it? And which warnings were ignored?
Climate change is another recurring theme. For Skyler’s generation, climate disruption is not a distant threat but a lived reality. Her world bears the marks of rising temperatures, severe weather, migration pressures, and environmental adaptation. Yet her letters are not simply stories of loss. They are also stories of resilience, innovation, and the capacity of communities to rebuild and reinvent themselves.
Political conflict runs throughout the project as well. Skyler grew up in the shadow of decades marked by polarization, misinformation, and fierce struggles over national identity. From her vantage point, she examines how societies create heroes and villains, how scapegoating can divide communities, and how democratic cultures either expand or contract in response to fear. Her reflections often return to a central question: What kind of people do we become when we face crisis?
Ultimately, Skyler exists to help us think about the present. By placing a voice several decades in the future, the letters create a form of historical distance. Events that seem chaotic today become part of larger patterns. Decisions that appear temporary reveal long-term consequences. The future becomes a mirror through which we can better understand ourselves.
I sometimes think of Skyler as a historian who has not yet been born. She studies our era with curiosity, concern, and occasional disbelief. She reminds us that history is never finished, that democracy is never guaranteed, and that the future is shaped not only by powerful leaders but by ordinary people making choices every day.
The Skyler Fusaro Letters are my invitation to readers to imagine that future—and to consider what story future generations might tell about us.
Skyler’s July 4th Letter
July 4, 2068
Dear Fellow Americans of 2026,
I’ve been thinking about your Fourth of July.
By the time you read this, you are celebrating America’s 250th birthday. You probably think history will remember the fireworks, the parades, the concerts, the World Cup soccer games, and the speeches.
It won’t.
History remembers different things than we do when we are living through them. We remember holidays. History remembers choices.
Looking back from my generation, we came to understand that you were actually observing two anniversaries. One celebrated 250 years since the Declaration of Independence announced to the world that all people are created equal. The other marked the moment when Americans had to decide whether the Constitution still mattered more than the ambitions of a president.
You probably didn’t realize that at the time. Most people never do.
You were busy with family cookouts, neighborhood celebrations, baseball games, and fireworks. You argued about politics around picnic tables. You watched television commentators debate polls, executive orders, court decisions, and campaign speeches.
Those things seemed urgent.
Some were.
But they were not what history ultimately remembered. What history remembered was the question beneath all those arguments.
Would Americans remain loyal to a Constitution—or would they gradually transfer that loyalty to a single leader?
That became the defining question of your generation.
We no longer remember every political speech from 2026. We don’t remember every angry social media post or every cable news argument. What we remember are the debates over elections, citizenship, truth, and the rule of law. We remember that Americans once again argued over who belonged. And we remember that, before politicians could answer, the Constitution already had.
That mattered more than many of you realized.
One of the first lessons we learned in school was that democracies rarely disappear in dramatic moments. They seldom collapse in a single day or because of one election. They slowly weaken when citizens begin believing that constitutions are obstacles instead of safeguards and that laws should bend to the will of powerful leaders. Once enough people accept that idea, democracy begins to shrink.
You were living through one of those moments. Some Americans believed that citizenship itself could be redefined by executive order. Others believed that courts existed only to validate political victories. Some argued that elections mattered only when their side won. Many came to view disagreement as disloyalty.
History taught us that these were never separate arguments. They were all arguments about whether power belongs to the people or to the person temporarily entrusted to lead them. The Fourteenth Amendment answered one of those questions long before your generation was born. Citizenship belongs to the Constitution—not to presidents.
That principle survived because enough Americans refused to forget it.
As I grew older, I often reread The Trump Files. What struck me wasn’t simply its account of one administration. It was its warning that authoritarian movements almost never begin by abolishing constitutions. They begin by persuading ordinary people that constitutions are inconveniences.
Once citizens stop defending constitutional limits, leaders no longer need to abolish them.
They simply ignore them.
Fortunately, enough Americans still remembered what the founders understood in 1776 and what the nation reaffirmed after the Civil War: liberty depends less upon the character of leaders than upon the strength of institutions and the courage of citizens. That is why there was still an America for my generation to inherit.
So, as you celebrate your nation’s 250th birthday, enjoy the fireworks. Spend time with your families. Tell your children why this country has always been worth loving, even when it falls short of its ideals.
But before the last firework fades into the night, ask yourselves one question.
When future generations remember this Independence Day, will they remember that Americans chose comfort over courage—or that they renewed their faith in the Constitution when it mattered most?
I can tell you only this.
The fireworks faded.
The speeches were forgotten.
The names of politicians slowly disappeared into history.
But the Constitution endured because enough Americans finally remembered that patriotism is measured not by devotion to one leader but by faithfulness to the republic itself.
That is the America we inherited.
And for that, we have your generation to thank.
With gratitude,
Skyler Fusaro
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