If History Has Taught Us Anything, It's That We Must Keep Living
Unless you’ve made a very concerted effort to completely unplug (which I’ve been tempted to do), you’ve been experiencing the chaos happening in America right now as the Musk-Trump regime attempts to destroy our democracy. I’m pretty sure most of us have been impacted, directly or indirectly, by what’s going on.
Since I live in the Washington, DC area, I’ve seen and felt a lot of despair up close—the government employee layoffs, the worry, anger, fear, and the jackhammering of Black Lives Matter Plaza.
Nothing however, felt worse than when, on January 29, American Airlines flight 5342 carrying 64 passengers collided with a US Army helicopter with 3 service members on board, and both aircraft plummeted into the Potomac River just beyond National Airport. Everyone perished, including promising young athletes. The accident was horrific, heartbreaking, and in my humble opinion, was a result of the misguided FAA firings enacted by an illegitimate entity called DOGE.
Less than 24 hours later, my husband and I drove past reporters standing along the George Washington Parkway, their grim faces bathed in bright lights as the eerie accident scene loomed in the background. A short time later at National Airport we boarded an American Airlines plane headed for Miami to help my sister celebrate her 60th birthday.
Trust me. I debated taking that trip, despite that fact that we’d planned it months before. Traveling that day was incredibly unsettling on so many levels. I was devastated and nervous about flying, but I also had something to be happy about. My sister’s milestone birthday. One that the accident victims and many other people will never reach.
Even now, with so much uncertainty in my city and around the country, I ask, as you may have asked too: do we stop living our lives? Do we forgo hope? Reject joy? Because I believe that’s exactly what the regime wants us to do—give up.
Well, I refuse to do that.
My parents and grandparents worked too damn hard, made too many sacrifices, and prayed too much for me to give up. In turn, I gather strength from how they lived. My mother once said, “if we were fearful, we would’ve been miserable,” in response to me asking her what it was like navigating around America’s sundown towns as a military family in the 1950s and 60s. Back then, my parents faced real physical threats.
The year 1968 alone rocked our country with tragedy. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated two months apart. Several cities were rattled by civil unrest. The Vietnam War had produced its deadliest year yet. College students were taking to the streets in protest. Racial injustice and segregation persisted.
It’s so easy to jump into the echo chamber that amplifies all that is terrible and frightening right now. Don’t get me wrong. I have moments when I just need to vent, and I do occasionally repost stuff online that hits a chord with me and I know will get others riled up.
We need to stay informed so that we can plan, but the echo chamber feels dark. While I will be intentional about where and how to join the resistance, I don’t want to expand the darkness. That increases fear, and like my Mama told me, fear causes misery. Instead of being fearful, she held onto the hope that things would get better. “And things did get better,” she said.
It won’t always be easy, but I’m deliberately choosing to live like my parents by embodying the principles I captured over and over again in telling their story—celebrate, plan for the future, listen to my favorite music, gather with family and friends, find reasons to laugh, help someone else, and trust God by staying in prayer.
I’ll also marvel at the sunset . . . and I hope you will, too.
Just a reminder that The Weather Officer, an epic American story, is available now.
I lived through the violence of the late 1960s and, at the time, felt the world was ending. I just finished reading I Wonder as I Wander by Langston Hughes. It is his memoir of his travels in the 1930s. One of the places he visited was Spain during the Spanish Civil War. He wrote this about the people living in Madrid under siege: "The will to live and laugh in this city of over a million people under fire, each person in constant danger, was to me a source of amazement." We will make it through this also.
We are going to keep it moving! The backlash coming will spin heads. It's just one moment in time.