Did you watch that interview on Fox News? I did. And maybe you saw what I saw.

What I saw was an extended metaphor for the condition of the country itself.

A woman, a person of color, representing a new generation and a kind of voice that hasn’t always been heard in American life, but more and more is being heard now, trying to speak — and a barrel-chested, pomade-glazed relic of the “Mad Men” era, interrupting her and interrupting her some more and interrupting her some more still, and then adding to his interruption some interruptions, and then also interrupting.

Fox News’s Bret Baier wasn’t just trying to stop Vice President Kamala Harris’s words. He seemed offended at the notion that her vocal cords actually make sounds. He invited her voice on his show and was upset that it had a volume.

I doubt there is any woman, any person of color, in this country who has not been in a meeting and experienced this kind of bulldozing. And some of them watch Fox News and still don’t like being interrupted.

Last night’s interruptionism, elevated almost to an art form, is a metaphor for the state of the country because a minority of Americans like Baier, an encrusted old guard, wants to interrupt the future itself. But the future will not be interrupted.

They don’t want to hear voices not their own. But those voices are growing louder.

They think the country will be lost when more people speak. But we know the country will actually come more fully than ever into its own when we all speak.

And we’re not done speaking.

This post was originally published on The.Ink.