This Is Why God Put You Here at This Time

"We the People" -- The animating words of a covenant that holds only if we do

“This is why God put you here at this time.”

Historian John Meacham said it almost casually to Stephen Colbert, after Colbert made a joke comparing the idea of seizing Greenland for “national security” to simply grabbing someone else’s tie because you want it. The audience laughed — but the laughter landed because the analogy exposed something real.

Meacham had been talking about his book American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union — about people throughout history who spoke to their national moment. The Founders, he reminded us, anticipated “seasons of fear.” They expected that there would be times when our appetites and ambitions would outweigh our “better angels.” That’s why they didn’t build a system around virtue alone, but around restraint: checks, balances, and the rule of law.

Colbert pointed out that the Federalist Papers read uncannily like warnings about a certain type of leader — one driven more by appetite than obligation — and that the Constitution did everything it could to guard against that. Still, Meacham emphasized, the document’s animating words are “We the People.” The Constitution is only as strong as those who live under it: voters, officeholders, and the people willing to act as checks and balances when power overreaches.

Meacham believes we are in a moral crisis. Too many of us, he argues, have decided to put our own interests ahead of the constitutional order — an order based not on taking whatever we want whenever we want it, but on honoring a shared covenant.

That’s where the tie analogy came in. If I like your tie and I want it, Meacham said, I don’t get to just take it. Wanting something doesn’t entitle me to it. The covenant requires that I find a lawful, ethical way to pursue it.

Colbert countered with the joke that made the room erupt: What if the tie were Greenland? What if national security required taking it before another power did?

That’s when Meacham responded, “This is why God put you here at this time.”

Not because Colbert is special in some cosmic sense — but because he made the moral mechanism visible. Fear turns appetite into necessity. Rationalization replaces restraint. And suddenly, breaking the covenant feels justified. That line stayed with me all day. Not because I believe God assigns roles like casting a play, but because it raised a quieter, more uncomfortable question I’ve been circling for years: What does it mean to be shaped for a moment you didn’t choose — and how do you tell the difference between humility and hiding?

It’s impossible to think about this only in the abstract. Just days ago, another peaceful protester was fatally shot by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis — a moment that has reignited national anguish about law, authority, restraint, and accountability. Whether one’s instinct is outrage, fear, or withdrawal, the question underneath is the same one Meacham was naming: What does “We the People” require of us when fear presses hardest?

I’ve also been thinking about these questions alongside my mother’s story. At twenty-four, she tricked a Chinese Communist Party official into giving her and her sister travel papers — just before the Cultural Revolution, when outspoken students like her were being imprisoned or killed. This wasn’t abstract political risk. It was survival. Later, from a refugee camp in Hong Kong, she applied to Barnard College. Not as one of many applications. As the only one she made. She had already decided that if she didn’t get in with a full scholarship, she would return to mainland China. Those were not hopeful odds. They were near-impossible ones. And they paid off.

Which is why, later in life, she wanted safety for me. Not because she doubted my ability, but because she understood — viscerally — how narrow the margin had been. She knew exactly how much courage costs. She wasn’t afraid instead of being brave; she was afraid because she had been.

There’s a pattern here, and it’s not just personal. People who take extraordinary risks to escape instability often spend the rest of their lives trying to preserve what they’ve secured. Survival gives way to conservation. The risk-taking muscle doesn’t disappear — it just stops being exercised.

This is where Crappy Childhood Fairy Anna Runkle’s Stop Playing Small work fits so precisely. Playing small isn’t a lack of purpose or courage. It’s a survival strategy that outlives the conditions that created it. Nervous systems — individual and collective — prefer familiarity over expansion. Fear makes contraction feel wise.

When you are operating from scarcity or threat, you stop listening to your own signals. You start outsourcing discernment — to authority, to approval, to whoever seems safer or more certain than you feel in that moment. What looks like humility is often a nervous system trying to avoid danger it remembers all too well.

In that sense, playing small is the most universal human impulse there is. For every single one of us, resisting the fullest expression of who we are is safer — especially when that expression requires visibility, responsibility, or moral risk.

But here’s the rival perspective — and it matters. Not every urge to step forward is wisdom. Not every moment calls for intervention. Sometimes restraint is maturity. Sometimes not inserting yourself is the most ethical choice available.

I’ve learned this by watching situations unfold where everything in me wanted to clarify, correct, or steady something that felt wobbly — and where doing so would have satisfied my discomfort more than it would have served the moment. There are times when allowing others to navigate their own dynamics — even awkwardly, even imperfectly — honors boundaries that intervention would quietly violate.

In those moments, silence isn’t abdication. It’s respect. Purpose isn’t volume. Courage isn’t constant visibility. Moral seriousness doesn’t require being the person in the middle of every room. The difference is subtle but essential: Is restraint being chosen deliberately — or inherited automatically from fear that no longer fits the moment? I didn’t come to this understanding through abstraction, but through moments when stepping back — rather than stepping in — turned out to be the more responsible choice.

There’s precedent for this kind of restraint. After the Revolutionary War, when the new nation was unstable and angry, George Washington had the power and support to force order by taking control. He didn’t. By stepping away rather than stepping in, he gave the country the chance to live up to its own ideals instead of having them imposed. It was risky — but it taught a young democracy something force never could: that legitimacy has to be chosen, not compelled.

That distinction — between reflex and responsibility, between fear-driven action and deliberate restraint — isn’t just personal. It’s the same distinction the Founders were trying to encode into a constitutional system that assumes human weakness but insists on human responsibility.

The Founders weren’t naïve about human nature. My mother wasn’t naïve about risk. And neither, I think, should we be about the work of healing or citizenship. The question isn’t whether fear exists — it always does. The question is whether we allow fear to redefine appetite as necessity, or safety as the highest good. Some generations take risks so their children can be safe. Others are called to take risks because safety is no longer enough.

I don’t know if anyone is “put here” for a moment in a cosmic sense. But I do believe moments arrive that ask something of us — as citizens, as inheritors of our parents’ courage, as people deciding whether to keep playing small or to step, carefully and consciously, into responsibility.

And I think the hardest part isn’t courage itself — it’s giving ourselves permission to recognize when the moment has changed.