Remember that campaign? The massive block letters planted around the city, perfect for a photo op, but more than that, a declaration. Dallas was buzzing. Dallas was bold. Dallas was the kind of place where big, forward-thinking decisions got made. The kind of city that believed its best days were ahead of it.

That could not be further from the truth.

For all intents and purposes, Dallas has become ground zero for everything determined to drag this country backward. We are home to Miriam Adelson’s, Trump’s most powerful donor, pet project and to Robert Jeffress, his evangelical bulldog, who uses his pulpit to baptize the president’s every action as holy and divinely sanctioned. We talk like a city on the rise. Meanwhile, our mayor cannot decide which party he belongs to, whether his vows are worth honoring, or whether he will bother showing up consistently to the city he campaigned to lead.

Dallas is exhausting.

I love this city with everything I have, and it is exhausting.

It is exhausting to watch task force after task force convene around ending homelessness while we refuse to meaningfully invest in deeply affordable housing, mental health infrastructure, and long-term stabilization. Dallas County reports thousands of residents experience homelessness each year, and despite cranes filling our skyline and luxury towers rising almost monthly, working families are being priced out of the city they built. We celebrate billion-dollar developments while entire communities live one emergency away from eviction.

It is exhausting to live in a city where prosperity is so visible and inequity is even more visible.

Dallas is one of the most economically segregated major cities in America. The life expectancy gap between ZIP codes in this city can stretch by more than a decade depending on what side of town you live on. In North Dallas, opportunity feels infinite. In Southern Dallas, residents are still fighting for basics: grocery stores, sidewalks, reliable transportation, flood protections, and economic investment that is not tied to displacement.

And still, we pretend these are isolated issues instead of deliberate outcomes.

It is exhausting to wave the “Big Things Happen Here” banner while half our city council fights to preserve a building most of their constituents have never stepped foot inside, all in the name of history and art that has never been made accessible to the very people living in its shadow. We treat culture in Dallas like an exclusive club instead of a public good. We pour millions into protecting institutions while starving neighborhoods of investment, public spaces, and programming that would allow everyday residents to actually participate in the arts we claim make us world class.

It is exhausting to watch our school district hemorrhage through a $100 million deficit while the state systematically undermines public education. Teachers are leaving classrooms in droves. Schools are closing. Parents are exhausted. Students are struggling with learning loss, mental health crises, and instability, and our political leadership responds with culture wars and voucher schemes designed to siphon money from already strained public schools into private institutions that answer to almost no one.

And through all of it, Dallas continues performing optimism instead of practicing courage.

That may be what frustrates me most about this city: our obsession with appearing successful while avoiding the hard decisions success actually requires. We want to market ourselves as a global city while refusing to confront the deeply local realities harming the people who live here every day.

Dallas loves the language of innovation, disruption, and entrepreneurship. But when it comes time to disrupt inequity, suddenly we become cautious. Suddenly we become patient. Suddenly we are told now is not the time.

When exactly is the time?

Because while we delay, people are suffering in real ways. Families are being displaced in real ways. Public trust is eroding in real ways. Young people are leaving in real ways because they no longer believe this city sees them, values them, or intends to build a future that includes them.

We are a city at war with itself, and right now, the past is winning.

Dallas could be the city it claims to be. It has the talent, the diversity, the energy, and frankly the resources. This is not a city lacking money. This is a city lacking moral clarity. We have billionaires funding stadiums and campaigns while residents crowd warming shelters in the winter and cooling centers in the summer. We have corporations relocating here by the dozens while longtime communities are pushed further and further to the margins of the map.

The issue is not capacity. The issue is courage.

We must choose, loudly, decisively, and at some personal cost, to invest in people. In access. In opportunity. In the least of these. We must stop confusing civility with justice and branding with transformation. A city is not measured by the number of cranes in its skyline or corporations in its downtown corridor. It is measured by whether the people at the bottom can breathe there too.

If we do not change course, Dallas will not be remembered as the city that rose. It will be remembered as the city of accommodations again. The city that compromised itself into irrelevance. History will note that we had every ingredient for a real civil rights moment and let it quietly expire. That in the face of difficulty, we tweeted instead of testified. We reposted instead of rallied. We mistook visibility for sacrifice and language for action.

Big things can happen here.

But only if we decide to make them happen.

Only if we stop pretending that talking about change is the same thing as changing.

And only if we finally become brave enough to build a Dallas that belongs to all of us, not just the people wealthy enough to insulate themselves from its failures.