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

by R. Eric Thomas

And if ever there was a time to play the national anthem, it’s then. It’s in this place where something new is being built, where people are united in one goal, with one voice, where the future is hard to make out but, yes, it’s there. We’re there. Better and more complicated. That’s the only country I can survive in. I don’t live in that country, but every day by existing, by speaking, by loving, by writing, I make a vow to get there, step-by-step. To knit together the pieces inside that don’t coalesce; to find a community that is generative, or, short of that, to make one; to see the future.

Anything good in this country has had to be wrestled free.

And though we crowd the dance floor in the space that has been made specifically for us, our presence seems to create even more space, for those like us, for those yet to be. All heaven has broken out. And this is why, I think to myself as past and present and future collapse on themselves. Hope. This is the liberation that waits for us through the smoke. And isn’t that holy? Isn’t that love? Isn’t that worth living for?

You will not kill yourself today. Or tomorrow either. You will find a way to gather yourself up and push yourself into the next day. And sometimes that will feel like a blessing, sometimes a burden. But we will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive!

you will not live to see a just world. But you will live to see acts of justice.