Imagine hearing a man publicly call for you to be put in prison — not for a crime you committed, not even for a crime that occurred, but just, you know, on general principles. Then imagine watching crowds of thousands cheering and chanting along with him, many calling you ugly names, some calling for you to be murdered.

Imagine the media treating this man with deference, analyzing his unhinged and utterly untrue attacks on your character, your health, and even your appearance as matters of political strategy and not as examples of his manifest unfitness to be in public life (let along public office). Imagine that he has been revealed to be a racist, a tax cheat, a scam artist, and a sexual predator — but that the closest thing anyone can find to a mark on your own ethical record receives not just more attention than his scandals, but more attention than anything else at all.

Imagine even your own supporters ignoring the careful work you did to build a smart and progressive platform, ignoring your decades of service and achievement, ignoring even the words you say to them, and instead declaring that they’ll only support you reluctantly because something about you just rubs them the wrong way.

Oh, and those decades of service and achievement? Imagine you’ve been followed throughout them by a murder of crows, cawing about how you should be home baking cookies, or about how your haircut looks stupid, or about how you should smile more. Imagine an entire political party devoting itself to destroying your family, and imagine that they pay no price for violating the norms of our political system or the boundaries of truth or decency in the process. No matter how often the scandals they invent are proven to be bullshit, each new insinuation is granted breathless coverage by the political press. Imagine raising your daughter like that.

And imagine you aren’t a perfect person. Your public presentation is sometimes awkward. Your political instincts are sometimes off the mark. Your circle of friends and advisors includes some unreliable people. Your marriage has had its ups and downs.

But then imagine that you are defined by your flaws, even though many of the people who love to point them out have identical cracks in their own armor. Imagine having your physical stamina called into question by an obese man afraid to shake voters’ hands for fear of germs. Imagine being called a criminal by a man currently under a federal criminal investigation. Imagine having your husband’s infidelity used as an attack against you by Rudy fucking Giuliani.

Some days, I can barely read Twitter without wanting to hurl my computer in the ocean and live out my life watching birds from a hammock in the Panamanian cloud forest. And yet, here is Hillary Clinton, having crawled through decades of shit-smelling foulness I can’t even imagine, and not once has she quit trying to make the country a better place to live and work and raise a family.

If you or I had to live one day in her shoes — any day, from any point in her public life — by sundown we’d be re-enacting this scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVgK5HKj3P4

Hillary Clinton should have given up on us long ago, left us all to wallow in the mess we’ve made of our country and our democracy. But she hasn’t.