and when just the land remains

When I was a child, my grandmother taught me America the Beautiful. She was born in 1926 — one of seven children in a tiny, one-room structure in Fredonia, Alabama. A loud advocate for civil rights, she was motivated by an uncompromising determination from a time I cannot imagine experiencing firsthand. In the much-lonelier wake of her recent passing, and with delusional threats to this nation’s educational, environmental, economic, social, and political climate (to name only a few), I feel myself grieving a second death for my grandmother’s crinkly yet bright-eyed faith.

The anger we’re biologically endowed with, meant to dissipate upon action, has become the hushed anguish of dissociation, cynicism, and bitter irony. It is easy to understand why bipartisan ideals lie within fantasies of defiance. Protest has been pacified, its energy rerouted into spectacle: attempts at uglifying politicians and AI-fabricated toesucking. Surveillance weaves itself into our most ordinary moments. The phone camera need not make eye contact, nor the ones in Walmart, at the stoplight, on your neighbor’s door. Sickeningly moderate ideals of individual freedom have already been lost under total observation.

In the midst of this powerlessness, we Americans focus on individual preservation. For all of us, including trans people like myself, survival is the highest priority. But what of longevity? What of the right not just to exist, but to envision and build? If division is a tool of conquest, then what would it mean to accept the unsavory reality of being American, not with whitewashed moral distance, but with clear-eyed determination? If we are to act with vigor, shouldn’t the era of ironic cynicism end with obnoxious reclamation? I can think of no other solutions than to weave stronger, more purposeful braids onto the rope of my grandmother’s faith.

I must hold as tightly to faith as those before me. I must believe that faith is active. It is the labor of unsticking from easy presents,

of planning, advocating, and taking action. We have known for decades of the stakes in this beautiful land and for much longer of all our brothers’ rights. There is much yet to say: of democracy, immigration, economic disparity, and much remains to do.

We must act, and we must succeed. Would her undying beauty mourn us if just the land remains?