Hey, America, You Look Like You Need a Hug

Photo by Janosch Lino on Unsplash

My country is hurting.

We the people, are hurting.

The hurt shows up in so many ways, ways that surprise and distract and confuse us, ways that don't always look like hurt from where we're standing, ways that don't seem like pain from a distance:

Quick impatience with strangers in the checkout line.
Emotional outbursts at people we love.
Venomous, hateful, bitter social media tirades.
Polarizing partisan rhetoric.
Burning buildings and hurtful words and severed ties.
Self-medication, self-harm, and self-destruction.

These terrible, grief-worthy things are indeed exactly that: terrible and grief-worthy, but they are something else, something worse.

They are the symptoms of a cancer of despair and frustration that feels like it's swallowing us all whole right now.

They are desperate, grasping, frantic, fearful souls trying to keep from being buried alive in an avalanche of disturbed peace, bad news, and fleeting joy.

They are a nation's grief cries in the wake of children and hopes and dreams that have all died too young.

They are the real-time sound of a people losing hope.

Often, what we need most when we grieve is to be heard. Sometimes when we're in the middle of agony that cannot be made sense of, when circumstances are too frightening for our minds to bear, when the very next step seems beyond the strength our bodies have, we just need to be embraced—simply held by someone who does nothing but share the space with our pain.

Sometimes when life sucks, we just need a hug.

If I could do one thing today, I'd give this whole damn country a hug.

And here it is.

My goodhearted brothers and sisters, all the rage and the outrage and the questions and the how very not right it all seems in our streets and in your spirit—I feel it all too.

I can't take it away from you.
I can't give you any easy answers.
I can't fix the stuff in you and in me and in all of us that is so very broken.

I'm just here to sit with you in this not rightness and feel it along with you.

And maybe that shared pain is the place we start from.
Maybe that common woundedness is the beginning of the one, long, agonizing road forward.
As disgusted and pissed-off and deflated, and as lost as you and I feel right now—maybe even that is reason for gratitude.

This hurt may be a kind of twisted blessing if we can respond to it.

It's a sign that our hearts are still working.
It's a sign that we all want something more.
It's a sign that we know there is a better worth seeking.
It's the sign that what is, is not what should be.

Right now, that might be all we can wrap our minds and our arms around, but maybe that is enough.

This isn't a toxically-positive, cheap, rose-colored, Kumbaya, Hallmark, happy end fix-all. There is real brutal, ugly, marrow-deep stuff we'll all have to deal with as we move ahead.

This is simply a soul hug of solidarity from someone who believes that the other real stuff: goodness and faith and justice and decency and love and humanity is still there, buried somewhere beneath all that hurt.

The fact that you’re this exhausted and this heartbroken but still here is worth celebrating. You’re still human enough to give a damn, and in a timeline as jacked-up as this one, that’s a friggin’ miracle.

Thank you for still giving a damn. It matters.

Be encouraged, America.

Our story isn't over yet.