Dante Stewart in Time Magazine: America currently finds itself in a storm. A dreadful, at times unbelievable storm. A storm so dire and visceral that it seems to be the stuff of fiction and fantasy. From the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, the questions that aren’t being answered, the throwing the fist in the air, the Democrat fumbles and internal shambles, to the continuous bloodshed in Gaza, to an airmen burning himself alive, to students being tear gassed just days before graduation—everything is hard. We are tired. And each day, as we watch the clouds form and move closer this way, we feel a sense of impending doom and dread. We are not okay. Nothing feels safe. And I am praying for us, truly, because what’s ahead will be far worse than what’s behind.
In times of crisis, be it the 1870s, 1960s, or the 2010s—each era some form of racial and political reconstruction to their name—there was always the question of what type of country would we be “after this.” At all of these points, the American experiment—for that is what this country has always been—has been rocked and challenged to its core.
And yet, there is something about this moment that seems different. “We in a rut, we been in a rut, we’re going backward,” my 90-year-old grandmother, who is a Black woman born of the South, told me in a recent conversation as she sat across the grandfather clock with an American flag enclosed in its compartment. Ninety years is a long time to be in a place and to have seen its bloody and at times glorious metamorphosis. Ninety years is a long time to be Black in America and to have seen America wrestle with your existence, when so many try to deny it or control it. Ninety years is a long time to have seen wars and deaths and wins and losses and terrors and joy and days and nights.
But the question I wrestle with, as I look out on our country, my children, and the moment we are desperately trying to find answers in: what are the lessons? If, as the poet Robert Frost says, “the only way out is through,” then how might we live together in the boat as we so anxiously wait for the storm’s arrival?
More here.
