A wise man once sang:

Come gather ‘round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
– Bob Dylan

Of course, he was right. The times are always a changin’: all things forever shifting, everything always in flux.

And right now, that perpetual change feels particularly terrifying and disorienting, as we find ourselves dealing with a never-ending tsunami of Constitutional crises, leadership failures, manufactured emergencies, curated conspiracies, human rights atrocities, and natural disasters.

But perhaps more than all of that, we are surrounded by what feels like a collective shift in the humanity around us; people who seem to be either turning away from the suffering around them, have grown ambivalent toward it, or worse, experience a perverse joy about it. It is the rising inhumanity we are seeing that is leaving us exhausted.

So, with all that worrisome shifting we’re immersed in, where can we find peace, where does stability come, what can we really hold on to? How do we stay human in times when inhumanity feels overwhelming?

We choose to do the work that only we can do, and the only work that we can do: we embody our values within our choices.

What would you say are some of the highest human attributes or qualities? Compassion? Kindness? Generosity? Courage? The good news is, nothing is preventing you from attaining such things. No politician can prevent it. No regime can hinder you. No hateful human being can keep you from being whoever you decide to be.

We stay human right now by staying within the space of our agency, by deciding over and over again who we choose to be.

We stay human by fighting the inhumanity within ourselves; by making decisions that center compassion, that override selfishness, that show bravery, that reflect whoever it is we aspire to be.

We ask ourselves what kind of person the world needs right now, and do our best to be that kind of person.

That helps us stay sane within the turbulence of change:

The human being you are in favorable circumstances is the human being you can be in disastrous ones.

The human being you are in a fully functioning Republic is the human being you can be in one that is failing.

The human being you are when responsible leaders are in power is the human being you can be when your leaders are malignant narcissists.

The human being you are when people around you seem decent and loving is the human being you can be when surrounded by people who seem to have lost the plot.

The human being you are when everyone around you believes what you believe is the human being you can be when no one around you believes what you believe.

You have the capacity to be constant when the environment you find yourself in is changing.

Shift happens, friend.

The times they are a changin’, but you can choose not to let the times change you.

Be encouraged.

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This mess we’re in? It has nothing to do with politics.

The current President is a court-adjudicated rapist who recently paid nearly 6 million dollars in damages for sexual assault and defamation.

His name appears tens of thousands of times in the Epstein Files, and he has been credibly accused by dozens of women of sexual assault and harassment.

He is a 34-count felon, indicted four separate times, with 88 charges, ranging from fraud to election interference.

The only reason he is not in prison right now is that he has assumed the Presidency and marshalled the vast resources of the office to pervert our judicial and legal processes.

Despite all of this, we still have family members, friends, former friends, and neighbors who would vote for him again right now.

In what universe, in what iteration of this nation over the last 250 years, would a being this bereft of human decency have been tolerated in office, let alone passionately embraced?

In what political movement would rape and treason not be dealbreakers?

The answer is none.

This isn’t a political fracture.

I wish it were, though, as that would be relatively easy to navigate.

We are not a nation, as we’ve often thought, simply positioned on either side of the aisle working to craft reasonable, good-faith compromise somewhere in the humane middle. Sadly, that ship left the port a long time ago.

We aren’t even contending with a blind political tribalism that sees party over country, as the GOP of a decade ago has long since been rendered unrecognizable, abandoning its calls for a limited Government in exchange for unabashed authoritarianism.

The prevailing narrative of the last decade is that America has been fractured by political ideologies, bunkered down in disagreement on what path will most serve the common good. This is a dangerous fiction we need to discard once and for all.

The dividing lines in America have nothing to do with party affiliation anymore.

Just open up your phone, eavesdrop at the checkout line, or talk to your neighbor, and you’ll see the lines along which we now find ourselves:

One side celebrates innocent people being assassinated in front of their children, without due process.

One side rejoices in strangers going without food or medical care or housing, without knowing a single one of their stories.

One side applauds the bombing of foreign school children and the destruction of entire populations.

One side blindly despises other people for their gender identity, despite it having no impact on their lives whatsoever.

One side reduces an entire population to terrorists and drug dealers to justify their swift eradication.

One side conflates whiteness with righteousness.

One side defends the protection of pedophiles.

One side steadfastly worships a felonious, treasonous rapist.

And none of this is about politics; it’s about when faced with the suffering and injustice in our path, whether we will default to compassion or to cruelty.

America’s present divide reveals the orientation of hearts as we move through the world, the story we tell ourselves about other people, and what we want our lives to be marked by.

Will we be bleeding-heart empaths who err on the side of love toward all our neighbors, or callous, f your feelings sociopaths who rejoice in the pain of others because we’ve dehumanized them to the point that their lives are worthless to us?

Will we see empathy as our highest calling as human beings, or as a character flaw needing to be discarded?

One of the greatest lies we’re asked to accept as gospel is that all opinions are valid, that every position is somehow equally worthy of merit and deserving of consideration. We’re often led to believe that in every situation where an impasse is reached, the most humane response is to “agree to disagree”.

Of course, we can disagree on all sorts of issues without that disagreement being a , but there are some things that, as people of faith, morality, and conscience, we simply will not allow—and these things transcend politics.

The days ahead are going to require us to dig beneath the surface skirmishes and into the bedrock of what’s really happening here so that we don’t waste a second fighting fruitless battles that miss the point entirely.

Refuse to be gaslit and guilted for allowing “politics” to get in the way of your relationships because that’s not what’s happening here. This is an effort by people around us to sidestep conversations that call them to accountability for their beliefs, choices, and alignments.

It’s time we stopped pretending that our current national crisis is political, as that only serves to distract us from the far more worrisome truth that we need to reckon with:

We’re not politically divided; we are morally fractured.

We are not fighting legislative battles but a war to stay human or abandon our humanity altogether.

No election result will change that.

No power balance in Congress will remedy it.

No dictator’s expulsion will heal the brokenness of the people around us.

The question is, what will?

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To Our Loved Ones,

To Our Grandparents, Parents, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins, and Older Siblings,

We’re aware of what you think of us, either because you’ve told us during explosive, room-clearing conversations, over terse Cold War text exchanges, or in second-hand words passed through the people who now serve as the sole intermediaries between us.

You believe that we’re lost.

You believe we’ve changed.

You think we’ve become radicalized.

You think we’ve abandoned our faith, our families, and our nation, and you’re disappointed with us.

And we need you to know that you’re largely responsible.

Much of this is your fault.

You say that we’ve changed, and we have: we’ve become the people you taught us to become when we were growing up.

people who are deeply offended by inequity,

people who look out for the underdog,

people who grieve the suffering of others,

people who find the beauty in the diversity around us,

people who want others to have enough,

people who are aware of how fortunate we are to live here,

people trying to love our neighbors as ourselves,

people who detest liars, predators, and con men,

people who abhor bullies and bigots and braggarts,

And the people that we’ve become, in large part because of the wisdom and compassion you poured into us as children, can’t fathom, as adults, how you’ve voted for Donald Trump three times and how you still support him now.

It would have been unthinkable to those younger versions of us (and the younger version of you, for that matter), that you would have embraced this man: his cruelty, his depravity, his petty, vengeful, unloving heart.

That’s not the way you raised us, and so whatever issues you have with us now, you need to understand:

You made us this way.

You have radicalized us into loving, compassionate human beings, and we can’t fathom how that can be a problem for you.

We’re really proud of the people we are today, and grateful for the time you spent with us; the lessons you taught us about seeing all people as inherently valuable,

about being a person of your word,

about telling the truth even when it’s costly,

about admitting your mistakes,

about taking responsibility for your actions,

about valuing people over money,

about how we treat people, being what defines us,

We were paying attention in history class.

We were paying attention in Sunday School.

We were paying attention around the dinner table.

We were listening.

We believed you.

We did what you told us to do and became who you told us to become—and so now we care about the world, and we despise evil, and we live open-hearted and open-handed.

And that’s why we’ve found ourselves standing here wondering how you’ve become people we no longer recognize, how you’ve embraced the embodiment of the ugliness you warned us to avoid, how you stopped taking your own advice somewhere along the way.

You say that you only support the party or the policies and not the man—but we remember you telling us that we are known by the company we keep, that the ends don’t always justify the means, and that we can’t gain the world (or a Supreme Court seat) and lose our souls. Back then, you wouldn’t have tolerated those flimsy excuses for aligning with someone horrible, and we won’t tolerate them from you now.

As children, we looked up to you, and that part of us will continue to love you dearly and be grateful to you.

But as adults, we now see you eye to eye, and we grieve the loss of the people we imagined you were when you were teaching us how to be good human beings.

By continuing to support this man, you have gone against everything you told us was important growing up: decency, honesty, fairness, maturity, and empathy.

Either you were lying then, or you’re wrong now.

Which one is it?

The children we were and the adults we’ve become both want to know.

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In those internal autobiographies, we all tell ourselves that we’re one of the good ones, that our presence on this planet is yielding something beautiful, something that will leave this place better than when we arrived. In those stories, we are the heroes, the helpers, the saviors, or at the very least, we’re decent people just doing our best.

That self-reverential story has a way of bleeding over into the place we call home, the nation we claim as our own. There is a poisonous exceptionalism that most of us were born into; a curated mythology inherited by our parents, our politicians, our pastors that convinced us that as a collective, we were good or godly.

Some of us live our entire lives believing we’re better than we are, that our nation is better than it is, until we are faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Suddenly, we realize that we might be the villains, the terrorists, the monsters, the accomplices.

We all grew up in this country learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, reading stories of Hitler’s unthinkable brutality against the Jewish people. We stared in disbelief at the images of walking corpses, emancipated from the concentration camps at the very precipice of death. We nearly vomited seeing jittery black and white newsreels of naked, indistinguishable human beings, stacked like cord wood. We read of an unrelenting barbarism against an entire group of human beings, whose only crime was existing in their skin.

And when faced with this sprawling inhumanity that defied our ability to hold it all, invariably we all thought about the German people, and we all asked ourselves, “What kind of human beings would allow this?”

We wondered what kind of morally broken people could stand by and watch generations of mothers, fathers, and children eradicated from existence, their communities razed to rubble, their cultures erased, their very humanity discarded.

From the safety of hindsight and the buffers of our own false stories, we’ve interrogated ordinary Germans from eighty years ago, lamenting their silence and inaction in the face of such horrors; condemning them as, at best, gutless cowards, and at worst, willing collaborators.

With stratospheric arrogance, we’ve told ourselves that we’d never have consented to such evil, that we’d have pushed back against it, that the abject terror unleashed on the Jewish people would never have happened on our watch.

And yet, there is Gaza.

Day after day, she testifies against us, documenting our indifference, recording our apathy, inventorying our inaction. She lifts our hands in front of us and shows us that her blood is all over them. She burns up the fictions of our goodness. She reminds us how easy it is for a nation to abandon its humanity, silence by silence, justification by justification, averted eye by averted eye.

Gaza is indicting the American people, and Iran and Lebanon are joining her. They are holding a mirror up to us as a nation, revealing exactly who we are— the truth about what we believe, about what we will abide, and what we will not stand for— and we should be ashamed and driven to our knees in repentance.

It would be damning enough to declare that many Americans now are as reprehensible as many Germans in the 1940s, but that wouldn’t be accurate; we are far worse.

We have access to America’s and Israel’s every vile deed in the palm of our hands. Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sociopathy floods our timelines. With the swipe of a finger, we can traverse thousands of miles and see the annihilation of a people in real-time. Unlike the German people in the shadow of Hitler, we cannot even attempt to plead ignorance. Through tiny screens that we are rarely more than inches from, we are 24-7 bystanders to the slaughter of children, to the bombing of hospitals, to the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people. We know exactly where the money is going, the politicians whose empires have been funded by terrorism, and the scale of the mass murders our tax dollars are funding.

And we are culpable for all that we allow or refuse to oppose.

One day, eighty years from now, generations of children all over the world will ask what kind of people would have allowed the genocide in Gaza to happen.

And it should break our hearts and boil our blood to know that unless we alter our course immediately and fiercely, we will be that kind.

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