Google AI provides a succinct definition of deja vu: "The intense, fleeting, and uncanny sensation that a current, new experience has already been lived or seen before, despite knowing that it hasn't."
But the sense of familiarity that so many of us are currently encountering is far from a memory glitch. It is a retrieval of vaguely recalled history lessons from our youth focusing upon the period surrounding the beginning of the American Revolution.
Consider these excerpts from the Declaration of Independence which list colonial grievances against King George III:
He has endeavored to obstruct ... the laws for naturalization of foreigners...
He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people...
He has kept among us, in time of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures...
He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and unacknowledged by our laws...
For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world...
For imposing taxes on us without our consent...
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefit of trial by jury...
For ... altering, fundamentally, the powers of our governments...
So many of these accusations seem to anticipate the Trump Presidency. But there's more to this collective memory than that document approved by the Second Continental Congress 250 years ago.
Back then people like Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Samuel Prescott warned the townspeople of the approaching Red Coats by shouting from horseback.
Today, folks are blowing whistles and using the internet to warn residents of the approaching ICE agents.
Back then, Patriots protested the oppression by raiding English ships docked in Boston Harbor and dumping crates of tea into the icy waters below.
Today's patriots protest the violation of our rights by vandalizing ICE facilities.
Of course, cynics may assert that any resemblance of our current era to that which surrounded the Revolution is, at best, superficial or partisan. But that kind of dismissal has become even less tenable since Trump has followed in George's footsteps by having his own portrait appear on US currency; something no other incumbent President has ever done.
Imagine for a moment that founders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Paine, were alive today. Can there be any doubt on which side of the barricade they would be standing?
Steven Franklin