Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

The thing is, the promise of church is community, salvation, and a relationship with God. If the gay music minister and the person with AIDS cannot be part of the church, where do they find God?

We don’t expect other humans to act sanely or with any sort of grace when they perceive scarcity, so it’s foolish to expect kids to. Perhaps this is where they learn it. Perhaps the yearly tradition of American children tearing across the White House lawn, dodging and diving over their peers, trying to snatch up as much as they can, is a metaphor itself. Or a precursor.

Does Easter have a villain? Is it Pontius Pilate? Is it Barabbas? Is it Death?

Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?

Also, I know that I have a very expressive face that cannot tell a lie, and I have no problem deploying it to project my displeasure in literally any situation. But deep down, I believe in a certain order. I like RSVPs, good service at restaurants, and polite party talk.

And, in the end, I know that we are not at war with our terrible leaders. Instead, we are fighting against nihilism itself. We are fighting to care. What makes you happy or sad or brings you joy or makes you feel anything at all—it matters.

We’ve had many an office conversation about time travel (haven’t you?) and decided that, if given the option, we would only go forward, because there’s literally no time in human history when it was great to be a woman or a gay Black man.

And I find it very annoying. The thing is, a catastrophic end to the world as we know it sounds like a lame experience. I am not interested in the least. It’s scary, yes, but mostly dumb. And the way we’ve been taught to think about it is so improbable. We are not going to band together and listen to a bunch of scientists to save humanity like Jake Gyllenhaal in a disaster movie. Sorry. You know how I know? Because a bunch of scientists are telling us how to save the world right now, and half the world isn’t listening to them.

How are we supposed to live without a meteor bearing down on us? How are we supposed to find the best parts of humanity without a brutal regime at the door? How are we supposed to tell the people we love that we love them if we’re not five minutes from being destroyed? That’s the challenge of being alive.

And it feels lucky and it feels undeserved and it feels hard and it feels right on time and it feels like the thing you’ve been waiting for.

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things,” Didion writes in her essay “Goodbye to All That,” “and harder to see the ends.”

I felt like one of those people who come to the Big Apple with a Big Dream and then leave five years later complaining about the cynicism and the noise and the constant crush of people and the hard edge that your dream must be sharpened upon, the almost unreachable bar, the cost.

Every “Goodbye to New York” essay includes a list of complaints about the city that are not a secret. There’s a lot of people, the subways are a real scandal, rent is too high, and everyone is trying so hard—yes, we know; they put these things on the tourism campaigns. It’s sort of the whole thing. Many essays about leaving are about the huge gulf between the romantic ideal of the city and the gross reality. As someone who has only a passing interest in acknowledging reality, I can understand this. But the question comes, for the New Yorker, for the citizen, for the participant, are the things that now seem unbearable the same things that made this place attractive?

And, ultimately, her decision to leave was internal and therefore ultimately not about New York as much as about the self. Or New York as a projection of the self. The writer saying, “I am not the romantic I once was.”

And sometimes that changes when you discover that the internet is actually just other people, and other people, scientists say, are terrible.

What is more romantic than the sudden revelation of the thing you didn’t even dare to hope for?

Rep. Waters is that Auntie who attacks your face with a wet wipe at every cookout and has a ninja-like ability to whip a comb out and run it through your hair before you can ever protest.”

Love is political. Church is political. Our friends and family—queer folks, trans folks, straight folks, white folks, Black folks, Latinx folks, Asian folks, baby boomers, Gen Xers, millennials, Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, and at least a couple Libertarians, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, agnostics, questioners, and atheists—are political. This act—daring to say that we believe in each other—is political. Daring to say that we believe in something, anything, is political. Daring to believe that we’ll exist in the future in America is political.

hate to break it to you all, but life is a mixed bag.

Look, I don’t know what you want to get from this. Things are going to happen, some of them good, a lot of them bad. People will die. People will break your heart. You’ll disappoint people. You’ll disappoint yourself even more. You’ll try things that don’t work. You’ll dare to hope and sometimes that will be rewarded and sometimes it will be mocked.

At a certain point, you forget where you end and pop culture begins.

Do you want to hear about all the good things? Or do you just want someone to coddle you and tell you there’s a happy ending?

You say you want a happy ending, but neither of those words is really what you’re searching for. For instance, you will not live to see a just world. But you will live to see acts of justice.

But you had to be who you were to get to who you are. Every page in the story is successive; they’re all numbered and bound like a book.