In my life I have known only fall.

It hasn’t been a short life or a long one, but it’s been enough to see how far it has fallen. Hope has given way to change. And yet, for the first time, I see the life that forces through that change—down to the earth and back up again.

My generation coincided with a fissure, one that was not seen or heard. It was a fissure between what was atop and what was beneath.

It happened not to us, or even to our great unconscious, but to nature itself. What seemed to be was not what was. I think of the ocean, the great life of the earth. I think of it warming, like a fever rising. And I think of how we don’t know it.

The British Navy was the first human empire of the world, carrying the first flag to cover the ocean round. But by the time of the fissure, when the sun had long set on the Union Jack, the ocean had been forgotten. In the Orwellian year of my birth, the First Sea Lord gave a name to this forgetting: ‘sea blindness.’ Our lives are shaped and made possible by the sea, by the trade on it, the bounty in it, the weather of it—but it’s not visible to us. This isn’t simply because most of us don’t live or work on the sea. It’s because we don’t imagine it anymore.

We used to tell sea stories. The first lines of the great American novel are about the call of the sea; how the young and the vital thirst for it. The story that follows is about the search for a whale, and the search for oil. Now the whales are mostly gone, because of oil. The circle seems to be swirling to a close.

Yet as I entered my maturity, all I saw of this, anywhere, was blindness. People still ate what seemed like plentiful seafood, as they did before, as they do now. People still got things made of forest delivered to their doorsteps over bridges of great solemn ships, as they do now. The world was spinning. Everything that mattered, everything that we shared, everything that could be saved, in our nature and in ourselves—the hope—was beneath it all.

The great leader of the age made it quiver by the simple mention of the word. That’s all he had to do. It didn’t need explaining after what had come before.

For a long time, the hope had been separating, like oil out of water. With the emulsion of the generation before, with the great American prophet of what must be living and dying before our eyes—but not before defining the great American dream, once and for all—it had seemed written. Prophets tell prophecies, after all, and prophecies are things that come to be.

In the furor of the present, as our change becomes hopeless—make America great again, they say, like a dream embalmed—I remember the words of a poet who foresaw prophecy:

‘O let America be America be America again
The land that never was and yet must be
The land where every man is free’
​

​I lived in the same neighborhood as another poet—Lin-Manuel Miranda, of Washington Heights—the night Barack Obama was elected President. Miranda’s Broadway musical that year, his first, was called ‘In the Heights.’

Between the time of the prophecy and that night, poetry and politics had separated like oil and water, just as nature had, just as our nature had. Now there was high and low, and low brought high, and high brought low.

I remember reading in the paper of record the next day that if you weren’t moved by this event, there was something wrong with you. Certainly that’s how I’d felt about myself as I watched the joyous young people—people of my generation, many of them people of color—honk horns and wave the American flag up and down Broadway. I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand, in part, because I was not a person of color, and I was not American.

For an American, there is no higher abstract than America. A great idea is an American idea; a great purpose is an American purpose. Charles Foster Kane is Citizen Kane. And as he put it, “I am, have been, and will be only one thing—an American.”

Much has been made of American exceptionalism as a point of political contention. This elides the stranger human truth that this principle is personal. And it goes beyond nation. It’s the self stretched out beyond the blueness of the earth.

In the wake of a broken building and its buried lives, a war was launched that sought no end. Even in name, the war was waged on fear, as though fear were something we could tear out of ourselves and the world itself. As though there could be an end to it at last. Fear itself spilled out of us like oil. This was the spreading wound I grew through as I came of age. The hope was that it could be staunched. But I was not American. I was from the big blue world.

When I came here, I was brought by an American of color to see an American of color who was talking about hope. That was the slogan in its entirety, not counting the other slogan, which was change, in its entirety.

We rode the train for an hour, from Washington Heights to Washington Square Park, to see the junior Senator Obama of Illinois give a speech. My friend, and the crowd, seemed inspired. It was rousing as spectacle, but I did not understand their passion, their identification, their direction. I didn’t see what they saw.

What I saw—irrelevant to them, irrelevant to all, and rightly so—was the shimmering surface of the water. And all my life, wrong as I have been, my hope had been drawn to the bottom of the sea.
​

​A jeremiad is so named because of the Biblical prophet Jeremiah. It’s a lamentation, a condemnation, a screed. It is unwelcome, and it yields no change. It is an object of pure and pointless hope, dead on arrival, and its very existence makes one wonder against nature, which should know nothing but survival.

Strange though it may be, it has nothing on the mystery of ‘prophet’ itself. The ancient Hebrew word from which it is drawn, na’vi, is not well understood. Its translation has been disputed throughout the history of biblical exegesis.

What is a prophet? Does a prophet tell us something we don’t want to hear? Or something that, deep down, we already know? Does a prophet beseech us? Preach to us? Reach out to us? Does a prophet convince us to reach out to her? Is a prophet a poet, or a politician? An idealist, or a pragmatist? Or is a prophet all these things at once? The truth of it is, to me at least, he is far more people than person.
​

​At best, I'm over a third of the way through my life. And life is so rarely best. Over the course of the life I have lived, more than half of all the poison we have ever used on our planet was given to it. I have been in this world while half of all its wildlife was made to disappear. At my birth, the snows of Kilimanjaro were still there. The Great Barrier Reef was as wondrous as ever. By the time I graduated high school, 80% of the big fish were gone. Metaphorically, as I saw it, this went for people too.

It’s often said that we live in dark times. Many times say as much. People of the now speak of a sea change, a gathering storm. The unprecedentedness of feeling. I am subject to this mood, to this quality of consciousness. I invoke it here.

The sea is so immense, and so dark. And we are so small and so light. The genesis fact is that our existence itself is a sea change.

We spend much of our lives in fear of aging. I am struck by the fear of being young. To be young is to be close to oblivion. You have no long memory of being alive, and you have the bone-deep sense that the life you have is fragile, even unwelcome to the universe. Why was I chosen to live? How can life itself be? How can I suppose that it will be here for very long still, when it hasn’t been here for very long yet?

It’s not till you reach old age that you experience this feeling again, this feeling of being close to death, to nothingness. But for a time, as we mature, we can grow to depend on ourselves, on our own lives, and we can come to believe that we’re home, and safe. The new lives we create demand it of us.

Not so long ago I believed that climate change was the worst of names. Bloodless and clinical, it seemed not to touch on the urgency of the thing, or the life at the heart of it. It's not that the weather is changing; it's that it's killing the things that live within it. Inextricable as the link may be between us and our great home, saving the earth sounds like saving a rock. The rock will be fine. We won’t be.

The planet has been here for billions of years, but the life it sustains has frequently come and gone. A few million years ago, there was an event we call the Great Dying. This seemed to me closer to the mark.

But now I believe that change is the word. Because that's what's happening, the only thing that ever happens: change. And we are changing with it, at a remarkable pace. It's what we're good at. It's what all living things are good at. And for all our self-loathing, and all our agonizing at our own tendency towards destruction, we are alive—and sensitive to our aliveness in a way perhaps no other living thing has been or ever will be. That sensitivity—what we call consciousness—is a miraculous, living thing in its own right. And it has saved us before, and might see us towards some kind of salvation yet.
​

Before he became President, Barack Obama’s pastor was the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Showcasing his political prowess, Obama neatly side-stepped Reverend Wright on his path to power.

This act was perhaps the major event of his campaign—the moment that, more than any other, cemented his candidacy in the popular imagination. In response to one of Reverend Wright’s sermons, he gave a universally lauded speech called ‘A More Perfect Union’.

In it—with the careful, hedged phrasing that would become his trademark—he disavowed Wright without saying as much. He acknowledged the sincerity of Wright’s words without saying as much. He spoke at length on the vagaries of American experience and progress, on its disappointments and failures. He spoke with level-headedness and grace without saying as much as Reverend Wright did.

As it happened, according to the rhythms of modern American political life, Reverend Wright’s speech was something like a bomb about to go off, and Senator Obama’s speech was something like a bomb squad doing its job flawlessly. By the time of his inauguration, sixty-nine percent of Americans approved of him. Just eight percent approved of Jeremiah Wright.

Reverend Wright, a man with a lifelong tradition of committed service as a soldier and clergyman, had spoken to America’s long history of violence at home and abroad. He invoked the genocide of the native population of the continent, the enslavement of his ancestors, and the national pattern of imperialism abroad. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, as others basked in bromides, he heatedly charged that violence begets violence. As war was launched in Iraq and others waved the flag, he raged: ‘God damn America.’

Jeremiah Wright served his country in war as a Marine. Marines are not known to mince words. They are also not known to stop being Marines. After his service, Reverend Wright tended to his flock, serving them for decades in health and hardship. Along the way, he got to know Barack and Michelle Obama as they wound their way through academia. He officiated at their wedding. He baptised their children.

Months before the election, as the toxic controversy Jon Stewart had dubbed the ‘Reverending Story’ entered its nastiest phase—Wright’s condemnation of Israeli aggression and American complicity was overheated enough to elicit charges of anti-semitism—Obama unequivocally condemned him and left his church.

Obama kept a portrait of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. (usually referred to as Doctor alone these days) in his office. He frequently invoked his memory. Most politicians—indeed, most Americans—do. The first black president was inaugurated the day after Martin Luther King Day. That’s when I saw the flags fly down Broadway. It’s when I heard people of my generation say that they were proud to be Americans again.

The Reverend Doctor preached peace, as all prophets do. He also called the American government the world’s “greatest purveyor of violence.” He said, “America was founded on genocide, and a nation that is founded on genocide is destructive.”

Reverend Wright spoke not as a doctor, but as a soldier. He saw himself as a fighter for the soul; President Obama saw himself as a healer of it. Prophets are both.
​

My wife was born on September 11th, 1984.

I was born four months before this politically and literarily loaded date. I miss the four months without her in it. I miss the decades it took to meet her.

On her seventeenth birthday, 2,977 people were murdered by nineteen others, who killed themselves doing it. She lived in a town not far from Washington, D.C.. When I first went to visit her home, two things stuck with me: Marine One or Two overhead, ferrying the most powerful people who’d ever lived to nearby Camp David; and the rolling wind over the hills, washing down through the valley to her family’s back porch. It was wind like I’ve never felt it before, or since: strong, calm, bright.

I was born and raised in a place where wind was often married to the word chill, and the union was an unhappy one. It wasn’t far from the feeling I felt on that fall day: a cold pain from far away. But also like the wind, it seemed impossible to tell where it came from, and from just how far away.

A novel we read in English class that year was 'Who Has Seen the Wind'. Much to my humanist chagrin, the government mandated at least one work per term of Canadian content—CanCon, we called it. It dawned on me only much later that my stubborn globalism was itself as much a product of my Canadianess as the CanCon itself.

The book, by W.O. Mitchell, is a wholesome schoolhouse work that has since faded from my memory, and did not linger long even then. Its epigraph, by Rossetti, rang the sole note of interest:

‘Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.’

It was a different day from any that came before. I saw my teachers and fellow students open up in a way that I had never seen before. They seemed shaken. They seemed changed. Most of what I felt was confusion.

Tragedies are not a time to air thoughts as private as the ones that swirled within me as this historical moment unfolded. Even now I feel a measure of shame and social disconnect in my reaction. But the world is different now, and I am no longer a child. And the truth is, I still don’t understand what others saw.

In a bright world—in times that are not dark—the terrible violence done that day would be a blight to forever change the world. But to me, this was neither the world nor the times we lived in. The world I was born into was a world where bombs detonated all over, all the time; where children stepped on landmines when they were out playing in a breezy field; where a child died of malnutrition every three seconds; where missiles were launched and planes went down and human beings were cut down by the thousands.

When I was ten years old, there was a genocide. The Canadian peacekeeper who commanded the U.N. forces where it happened, now Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire, once gave a speech I attended. A year before 9/11, he was found unconscious on a park bench in my hometown.

“We are all Americans,” was a slogan of the moment, from the headline of Le Monde on September 12th. Yet I was not American, and still am not. I don’t know what world this is now; it doesn’t seem familiar. Yet this is how it began.
​

Seeds contain both creation and dissolution. Along the way, there will be pain. Now that I’m a father, and someone who has survived their youth, I find that it’s our inevitable pain that will shape us more than our inevitable destruction. I don’t believe that suffering is productive, as some do, but I do believe that it is by-productive. It’s an artifact of change, and change is life. And life is a thing that is moving on: the change between death and death.

We think it's all ending. There's reason to think so. As our stories have been written, it is. So often we are handed our stories, and they are read for us: grown, harvested, processed, transported, fired, and all but masticated before the life of it all hits our blood stream. We know none of this can go on. The stories we are told never do.

We don’t see the rain falling, clouds bursting into torrents that drip through the living earth. We don’t see the death that lives through the soil, the bodies carved into it by the light and the life that surrounds it. We don’t feel the pulse driving through us, with no plot, no characters, no beginning, no end. Movies almost never show the sky. We paint a picture with no blue.

We keep asking what has happened, and we ask for stories that will tell us, and it’s still so hard to hear. What happened is the sea.
​

​In Southern California it’s never winter, but fall seems to last forever. Leaves float down through January without the trees ever going cleanly barren, the way they did where I grew up—where you looked up one day and saw the trees naked and stoic, ready for the snow.

The week Donald Trump was elected President, the fall had just begun, and the Santa Ana winds blew brutal through my adopted home. The air was like a slap. Everyone was sick, especially my daughter, who was as sick as she’s ever been. The doctor who treated her came from south of the border that was now apparently to be walled off.

It was paper dry. It was ash hot. The news was a nightmare falling. But for the most part, it’s a story we’ve both heard before.
​

Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote his masterpiece under the stars. The stars twinkling over Broadway, all in a row, that had shined on him already—‘In the Heights’ won the Tony award for best musical. The stars who lived above them, who had seen his talent and were eager to nurture it; Stephen Sondheim acted as a mentor. The whisperers of the court, who hailed the gestating piece even as it was being conceived—a long article in The New Yorker chronicled its rehearsals and antecedent works months before it opened.

The likely next American President, Hillary Clinton, was right there with him in the production’s early stages. And most famously, the sitting President was filmed smiling his approval at a White House performance of the show’s first song. The First Lady would later call the show the best art she had ever seen. And so it went from there.

Like almost everyone else in America, I haven’t seen Hamilton. Having begun my career in the fall of 2008, it was difficult to see myself in it. This goes for its themes of banksterism and meteoric rise as much as for the $2500 ticket price one buyer proudly championed in a New York Times op-ed.

Yet the story trickled down to me, in all its cultural Reaganomic glory. And I watched as it reflected the times in the puddle I lived in.

When I was Santa Claus young, communism breathed its last gasp, and what followed was a period in Western intellectual history best described as triumphalism. We had reached the end of history—the stories are always ending—and we would hitherto witness the perfectioning of a global order that was here to stay.

Puzzling to my generation was this same sense of self-congratulation in the wake of the Great Recession, which cost me and anyone in my exact age group our livelihoods and our futures. (Even as opportunities accrued over the ensuing decade, we of the sucker-punch vanguard were pretty much down for the count.) Yet triumphalism was indeed in the air. We had elected a black President, exactly on boomer hero Bobby Kennedy’s schedule, and for our parents, and their stories, it was the great victory of their time.

Hamilton was this story, this fist pump, this sing-song affirmation of the moral arc of history and its glorious bend towards justice. It didn’t enlighten, or even entertain: it flattered, and flattened. To those in their power and their maturity, it was a balm that glowed through every crack and crevice. And like its true subject, President Obama, it seemed impossible not to like.
​

A riddle: What changed the day a black man was elected President? Answer: A black man was elected President.

On the same day, millions of black people were locked in cages and treated with matter-of-fact brutality. Millions of black children were growing up in shattered families, through a system that guided them towards the same fate. Millions of people, of all colors, in the richest nation the planet has ever known, were hungry, desperate, buried to their necks and never getting out. Millions. Millions of one soul, one life, one story. A story that was rarely told, and rarely heard.

Wars raged, at our instigation, without merit or compass. Millions of us were swept up in it, becoming killers or amputees or makers of weapons or bodies under the earth, instead of teachers or doctors or makers of toys or bodies under the sky. Bombs were built, dropped, piled up like driftwood. Bullets flew over the world, shot through the air or shipped over the sea, red strips across the skin. People blew up. People were shot. Sometimes by robots. Never to end anything. Always a new hole in the ground, and a new geyser of blood and fuel to be burned. It was no longer necessary to be a soldier to be a soldier; to be accused of a crime to be found guilty; to be at war to be at war. The youngest adults today have never known peace. They have never even known that it existed.

A day came when another man was elected President. And that was when, for so many, the dark times began.
​

Barack Obama told a story. Whatever else it was, like an Oscar-ready drama, it was a story that worked. It touched people. It deserved to.

When I think of that story, I think of the little black boy who met the President, and the President who bent down to let the boy touch his hair—to feel with his fingers that this man who ran the world was made like him.

I think of him saying that if he had a son, he’d look like the innocent black boy shot and killed in the street.

I think of his apparent decency. I think of his great love and respect for his wife and children. I think of his ability to avoid looking foolish; a rare gift for those in the public eye. I think of his ability to calm people down. He is a great public figure in the mold that they are now made. He likes people. People like him.

I consider his achievements: a gradual but stable recovery from a devastating economic crisis not of his own making; the creation of an agency meant to protect consumers from predatory financial practices; progress towards slowing climate change; practical reforms to a disastrous health care system; the back-burnering of America’s military campaigns around the globe; a climate of dignity in public life. I think of this story, and just how meaningful it truly is. Whatever else he did not do, he sincerely strove to heal.

Such is the preface I’ll give—the one that’s necessary to any attempt to speak to the politics of the Obama era. I don’t reject this decency. But it remains shocking to me that such meaning is meaningful. That the leader we elect to serve us should seem decent, and that he should make some good faith efforts to advance our interests, does not seem like the sort of thing that would merit mention, let alone eclipse all else. The fact that we expect otherwise, and welcome even the appearance of an ally in the White House, seems like a deadening giveaway that this is not, nor do we believe it to be, a democracy. It has something in common with celebrating that the quarterback throws in the right direction. If we can’t assume that, we can’t assume that we’re playing football at all.

Yet that was what was achieved: the deep and true sense that our President was not actively working against us. In the wake of a Presidency that was founded on a grey market election, in the midst of wars waged by lie and fiat, this was indeed meaningful. But the progress won meant little beyond not going backwards.

I saw Senator Obama speak. It was all welcome enough. He mentioned a living wage. He said the Iraq war had been “a bad idea.” About torture—torture—he said “that’s not who we are.” As it happened, in the end, going backwards was where I hoped change would begin.
​

“It’s a good thing I’m not President,” said Jesse Ventura, soldier, athlete, and the former governor of Minnesota, on Larry King Live. “Because I would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law.”

His training as a Navy SEAL had required him to be waterboarded. “What was it like?” asked King. “It’s drowning,” he replied. “I’ll put it to you this way. Give me a water board, Dick Cheney, and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.”

I read an op-ed years later by someone who’d been involved in the American torture program. By then he was a teacher. He’d tried to relate to his students the tragedy of what he’d been a part of. What he found was that, like his government, they didn’t much care. That’s what we’d taught our children: that it didn’t matter.

President Obama’s decision was to “turn the page.” Today, the whole affair merits little attention. A film last year about the torture program was thought to be a breakthrough for its lead actor, Adam Driver, and a fine work besides. Driver was nominated for an Academy Award—for another film. This one received no nominations. In a rarity, its studio did not release box office figures, but analysts suggest it underperformed, and almost certainly did not recoup its modest budget. This story doesn’t matter to us.

The word that has followed President Obama is ‘cool.’ An SNL sketch early in his tenure essentially just repeated the word around him over and over; the trope has continued to the present day. It was a welcome and attractive feature in a person and in a politician. So many of us are so wound up in and ground down by the heat of the days. Politicians who respond to that kind of energy are called ‘populists’, and the word is not shaded: the understanding is that such people are frenzied, unhinged, and indecent. That the very word connotes a recognition of people and what they’re going through is not the intended meaning.

“We don’t need more heat; we need more light,” Senator Obama said in his campaign. It seemed like a balm. A decade later, we have the fire and fury.

As someone who never supported President Obama, I’ve had to live with the underlying social fact of not being cool. Much of the anxiety of the right lay in this direction too. Whatever power they might wield—and after an ongoing wave of political victories through the decade, that power was more and more considerable—they felt themselves marginalized by the culture. It’s not the kind of marginalization readily explained or countenanced. Given their outsized influence, it was an easy feeling to mock. But man is a social animal. We want to be liked, to go along with the crowd. To go against it augurs poorly for our survival, and we know it, bone-deep.

It wasn’t cool to be critical of capitalism when Ronald Reagan was President, or to be a Democrat generally. He had captured the age. The same was true of President Obama. As for me and those like me, we were not granted even the shelter of the church or safe passage by think tank. For us, there was the representative opinion of comedian John Mulaney, who likened it to having a Milhouse in our midst: “Why don’t you get your sleeping bag and get out of my house? And take your goddamn EpiPen.”

Cool has the remarkable quality of being both cruel and kind. Intimately linked to humor, it’s oriented towards bringing people back into the fold. It implores us not to go it alone. To me, this meant leaving too much behind.

The stubborn fact of it was, for much of my life, I didn’t understand why the healing mattered so much it meant burying the fight for our lives beneath the sea.
​

There is no virtue to empathy. It's a feeling, and no more, and it doesn't make you a good person. In my case, it came perilously close to making me a bad one.

When I was young, trying to survive a broken home with a broken brain, I saw breaks everywhere. I see them still. But my eyes have changed.

As a child I learned that a child dies every three seconds in this world. That millions of children go to bed hungry every night. That one in three human beings have no toilet to use, and become sick from the feces on their hands and in their water. 700,000 children die from dysentery every year, their lives draining out of them like water they can’t stop from running.

I used to say it to myself. One two three. One two three. One, two, three.

The fact and the scale of this death has remained unchanged all my life. And it has also been true that it could be stopped, and that all those children could be saved. Not through miracles or heroes or moon shots. By building toilets.

This world has more riches, more bounty, than any past generation could have imagined possible. People have homes that cost what the pyramids did. People eat hamburgers with meat from a hundred different animals spread over continents. A package can appear on your doorstep containing something made on the other side of the world within an hour. It travels over an ocean that covers half the world to get there. No toilets still. One two three.

It's a hard, complicated world, and I am a naïf, and it took me far too long to learn that these kinds of reveries do no good. I am grown now, and I still don’t understand this world much at all. But I do know this: A dollar in sanitation saves seven dollars. Whatever it saves, a dollar in war always costs infinitely more than a dollar.

Accounting human life, or other life, is a hopeless pursuit. Value is not worth. But it does tell a story nonetheless, like the light given off by a fire that burns you. A war was started almost twenty years ago that remains unresolved. Millions served. Trillions of dollars were spent. But none of that tells the story, because stories have both beginnings and endings. The American government’s largest annual expenditure to veterans of the First World War came in 1968. Bombs don’t stay buried.

I don’t see the world the way I did when I was a frightened child anymore. But there's still enough left of the child in me to wonder why it’s not a great deal harder and more complicated to drop bombs than it is to build toilets, and why hope has to die before it lives.

We are called polarized. But poles are around the same sphere. I don’t see our big blue bloody world in what we do, and how we think, and what we feel. I see what you see: a story. That’s what they call the news.
​

What happened? There is an answer that is a question. Who is telling the story?

What is a tragedy to one would be a grace note to another. What is a comedy to one would be a cruelty to another. What is a story to the one who tells it is a beating life to the one who lives it. And the person living that life would know what we all know: that life is not a story. It has no beginning; it has no end; it has no truth. It exists to be, and to be gone.

Yet these stories fill us up like water, and they sustain us. They define our existence in a way that our beating hearts do not. They have an essence, and a fragility, and a purpose. They are our children.

It takes a village to raise a child, and a nation to forget him. The nation we live in forgets, moment by moment of every day. Because there are things that matter and things that don’t.

A human being is not a Democrat or a Republican. But unlike a human being, a Democrat or a Republican doesn’t think that millions of children going to bed hungry is much worth mentioning. It may be important, but it’s not new. And if it’s not new, it’s not news.

In cell biology, media is the substance in which an organism grows: both its food and its environment. One might think that the administration of our common lives would happen on its own, but it exists in the substrate of media. We do things not because we do things, but because we talk about doing things. And when we talk, we get a story. We are rarely the ones telling the story. But as I’ve grown up, I’ve come to discover that no one really does. Stories tell themselves–and sometimes they use us to do it.
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I listened to 'The Rite of Spring' for the first time not long ago. I had heard it before, as a child.

It was terrifying to me. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it was terrible, in the great biblical sense that it was mighty beyond understanding. It made me think of the ocean.

“The violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking [open],” Stravinsky said. “That was the most wonderful event of every year of my childhood.”

What would the sound be of a thousand thousand flowers bursting through the earth all at once? And what would it feel like to be standing on the earth when they did?
​

​I don’t believe there is some grand plan to make the world as it is, in all its bewildering evil. Evolution has no design; it has moves, reactions, pinpricks. Dot by dot by dot. Yet draw back from the surface and you see a pattern that fits the whole. Que Seurat Seurat.

I once went to see a politician I admired from my own country speak to the issues of the day—a day which was dawning with neverending war. He had met briefly with President Bush, whom he had asked to consider the consequences of what he was doing. The President replied that he would do whatever was necessary to protect the American people.

As he was the most powerful person in the world, a pledge of this kind bore great force. There is much within the power of such a man to protect the health and prosperity of the people he represents. The pained reaction of the politician I admired, and the murmur in the crowd, betrayed their intimation that war was not the answer. And beneath that was the stirring fearlessness of asserting that there was no real threat to face. But of course there was.

The leading cause of death to Americans, then as now, is heart disease. Giving people money to buy fresh food, eminently within the power of the President and a few hundred people like him, would save countless lives. Providing access to health care, a birthright to human beings in dozens of countries with far fewer resources, would do the same. Disaster preparedness, scientific research, agricultural infrastructure, clean energy, and many more dimensions of governance protect people’s lives. In 2001, more Americans died of diarrheal disease than were killed on September 11th. That wasn’t a story.

This world is so filled with dreams. And the vastness of it, and the greatness of it, make it impossible to contain. We can’t feel it or begin to understand it. A child learns to swim in the same ocean where another drowns. Every day, every three seconds, people live in peace and fellowship and joy. Their bellies are full. Their hearts are full. They don’t hurt anybody. These two boundless worlds are bounded by the earth. So much oil, and so much water.

I used to believe in what I believed in. I used to think that it was what mattered most, more than life itself—that there were things worth dying for. There aren’t. I’m a parent now, and there’s only one thing that matters to a parent: life.

When I was young I was terribly afraid of death, like many young people, brushed up against oblivion as they are. I thought it was my life’s purpose to overcome that. It wasn’t. It was merely to transfer it—to my child. It doesn’t matter what I teach my child, what I impart to her, what values I instill in her, what beauty of the world I convey to her, so much as it matters that she live.

Her story won’t be mine. And I can’t say that what seemed like a nightmare to me might feel like a dream to her. The world is still breaking apart. I lived through a time that left me impoverished and stricken, in a mind so often lonely and broken, but my grandparents lived through a war that nearly ended the world. What will my story seem like to her? And sooner or later, God willing, it will be her story alone.

I watched my generation swallowed up by debt and uncertainty and emptied of much of our dreams, but the abyss can grow much larger than that, and of course, sooner or later it will. Through it all—now, while there’s still now—there’s a story that’s been told to us, and it was never mine.
​

“Mr. President, as I close, Mr. President, I heard you say Friday that you had questions for voters, particularly African-American voters. And you [asked] the question: Did the Democratic Party take us for granted? Well, I have raised questions. But let me answer your question.

“You said the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give forty acres and a mule. That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the forty acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the forty acres. We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us.

“Mr. President, you said would we have more leverage if both parties got our votes, but we didn't come this far playing political games. It was those that earned our vote that got our vote. We got the Civil Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the Voting Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the right to organize under Democrats.

“Mr. President, the reason we are fighting so hard, the reason we took Florida so seriously, is our right to vote wasn't gained because of our age. Our vote was soaked in the blood of martyrs, soaked in the blood of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, soaked in the blood of four little girls in Birmingham.

“This vote is sacred to us.

“This vote can't be bargained away.

“This vote can't be given away.

“Mr. President, in all due respect, Mr. President, read my lips: Our vote is not for sale.

“And there's a whole generation of young leaders that have come forward across this country that stand on integrity and stand on their traditions, those that have emerged with John Kerry and John Edwards as partners, like Greg Meeks, like Obama Baracka [Barack Obama], like our voter registration director, Marjorie Harris, like those that are in the trenches.

“And we come with strong family values. Family values is not just those with two-car garages and a retirement plan. Retirement plans are good. But family values also are those who had to make nothing stretch into something happening, who had to make ends meet.

“I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker, put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook, and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I'd have food on the table. But she taught me as I walked her to that subway that life is about not where you start, but where you're going. That's family values.

“And I wanted—I wanted somebody in my community—I wanted to show that example. As I ran for President, I hoped that one child that come out of the ghetto like I did, could look at me walk across the stage with governors and senators and know they didn't have to be a drug dealer, they didn't have to be a hoodlum, they didn't have to be a gangster, they could stand up from a broken home, on welfare, and they could run for President of the United States.

“As you know, I live in New York. I was there September 11th when that despicable act of terrorism happened. Few days after, I left home—my family had taken in a young man even who lost his family. And as they gave comfort to him, I had to do a radio show that morning. When I got there, my friend James Entome said, ‘Reverend, we're going to stop at a certain hour and play a song, synchronized with 990 other stations.’

“I said, ‘That's fine.’

“He said, ‘We're dedicating it to the victims of 9/11.’

“I said, ‘What song are you playing?’

“He said, ‘We're playing 'America the Beautiful.'’

“And the particular station I was at, they played that rendition song by Ray Charles. As you know, we lost Ray a few weeks ago, but I sat there that morning and listened to Ray sing through those speakers, ‘Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountains' majesty across the fruited plain.’ And it occurred to me as I heard Ray singing, that Ray wasn't singing about what he knew, 'cause Ray had been blind since he was a child. He hadn't seen many purple mountains. He hadn't seen many fruited plains. He was singing about what he believed to be.

“Mr. President, we love America, not because all of us have seen the beauty all the time.

“But we believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would make America beautiful for everybody.

“Starting November, let's make America beautiful again.

“Thank you. And God bless you.”

Barack Obama’s political career began in earnest at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He gave a good speech. He inspired people. When I attended his rally, one of the introductory speakers, the actor Jeffrey Wright, spoke to how the moment had galvanized him. The Senator from Illinois had only served a very short while in national politics, yet he rose immediately to the peak.

Such was decidedly not the case for the Reverend Al Sharpton, an activist since his youth and a failed presidential candidate. That was his speech excerpted above, delivered at the same convention that made a star out of Barack Obama. As the Reverend stepped off the stage, the news anchor Brian Williams, looking for all the world like a Ken doll with a backstage pass, asked him what he’d meant “as you went on about whatever it is you were going on about.”

Analysts were appalled at the damage Sharpton might have done with his speech. They feared he would alienate people, especially the swath of undecided voters so often at the center of electoral politics. Indeed, his recently ended campaign had garnered little support—broad-based or otherwise. A decade later, as President Obama wound down his second term, a poll would find that just a quarter of African-Americans felt that he spoke for them.

Candidate Obama never had to contend with a lack of enthusiasm from the black community. Bringing out the vote of disaffected people of color was a major component of his electoral success. I saw the flags waving down Broadway in Washington Heights. I see the black boy touching the President's hair.

I remember the day the first black President addressed the NAACP, the storied engine of social change founded by no less a figure than W.E.B. DuBois. DuBois was famously engaged in a lifelong battle of ideas with another prominent black activist of the day, Booker T. Washington. Their feud— centering on what hope should mean—has been an imaginative touchstone in the debate over social progress ever since. It was uneasily evoked by some commentators in the early days of President Obama's ascent, but it had little staying power. By his second term, it was a sidelong anachronism authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates were sorry to have invoked. Here was the first black President addressing the NAACP, and that was what mattered.

The President spoke about seeing street corners with drug pushers and reflecting that “it could have been me.” He lectured on personal responsibility, with advice to “turn off the X-Box” and “get to bed at a decent hour.” Afterwards, the NAACP released a terse statement thanking the President for his remarks.
​

Barack Obama, the most popular human being alive, was born the child of Ivy League-educated parents and raised in a family made comfortably off through banking. He attended an elite private school in Hawaii, then spent decades at several of the world's most prestigious institutions before segueing into a career in public life with a wealth of influential connections at his back. That this formative experience does not seem representative of the African-American experience is an observation that has left me far from the light of the Overton window. And it gets darker from here.

After writing two autobiographies before he was forty—both essentially works of campaign literature, and one with a title lifted from the sermons of Reverend Wright—he spent a few years engaging in overcoat-and-leather-gloves activism on Chicago's South Side. He then rose to a brief career in the U.S. Senate, a time spent mainly campaigning, during which neither of the major bills he introduced were successful. Then he became President.

It is a dull and resounding note rung throughout political history that you don't win elections by serving your country, just as you don't win a game by practising for it. You win by winning. America pays lip service to duty, but the true idol is the raw and chaotic virtue of victory. It's very much not about how you play the game, though of course a winner looks much better when they say that it is.

From the start, President Obama projected the aura of a winner. It's the first and only qualification of a politician. The trouble with service is that it costs something. It’s messy, and ultimately it takes something away from you. That leaves less room for the golden confidence of the unblemished.

In 2004, Americans had the option to elect a war hero who had bled for his country. They chose someone who had been credibly accused of desertion instead. In 2008, they had the option to elect a war hero who had been tortured for his country. They chose someone who had never worn a uniform instead. In 2016, they chose someone who openly denigrated a war hero who had died for his country.

As the dark election of 2016 rose out of the strange numbing fog that surrounded us, I remember thinking something even I wouldn't say aloud—not that there was anyone to listen. And it was this: that Donald Trump was a winner, and Hillary Clinton was not. Because whatever else she had done and not done, and whatever else he had done and not done, she had served.

It was a painful idea. The ethic of winners and losers is as evil as it is ugly, and I have resisted it all my life. I have even asserted that it was not real, and at my core I still believe this. But it seems impossible for me to deny after having lived so long in this country that it is something that Americans believe. And belief has overwhelming power.

A good winner may soften the blow of their social role by deflecting or denying it, but this does no more than reinforce the appropriateness of their condition. George Clooney can choose to be coy about being a movie star, but there is no denying that he is. There is only accepting it with grace or without.

What is galling to so many about Trump is that he articulates this American belief so nakedly. He does not keep up the pretense that his victory is the victory of all of us, or that the real heroes are so and so, or that everything he has achieved he owes to your unwavering bla bla bla. Instead he shows us exactly what should have been obvious all along: that winning is not earned. It is won. To winners, service is no more than misdirection. And the people who serve, the people who believe, the people who hope—these are no more than losers.
​

Symbols are dearly beloved. For many, the hope of their lives is contained in them. To those who had struggled all their lives for racial equality, the election of a black President was a moment of triumph unlike any other—a moment that meant change.

I don't often see the virtue in symbols. What does music matter next to life, or a flag matter next to death, or a leader matter over all of the lives we'll never see? It seems to me that they obscure more than they reveal; that they cost us so dearly they can never be worth the price.

At the moment when a black person was elected President, millions of black people were locked away in darkness and despair. How many people being set free would this symbol of leadership be worth? What is the true aim of our politics? To find a winner? Or to save ourselves?

Is it not worth more to free a human being from darkness than to set a crown on another? Would it not be better to save the life of a child dead of dysentery than to give another a tender moment with a cherished leader? What are the things that matter to us? And why?

An election is a moment in the story of how we take care of each other. On its own, it means nothing. Like a med school graduation, it's not a saved life; it's the hope that life will be saved. The more we linger on the symbol, the more we tell its story, the less we know of what the story really is.

Millions of children go to bed hungry every night, and not every night is election night.

But what the people of color waving the flags up and down Broadway knew then, and know now, is a part of the story I don't. In America, whatever and whoever you are, you are white or you are not. Whatever else the NAACP stands for, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is one of them. And what is color but a symbol.
​

For as much care as we give to what we're listening to, we give little to why we're listening to it. A song, a movie, a political candidate appears to us and we begin to consider it before we have wondered at how it got there. But the power of the object lies not in its nature, but in the fact that it is before us. This is a power we prefer to remain invisible to us, as we do the choice underlying it. But the choice is real, and definitive. What we are talking about is far less revealing than why we are talking about it in the first place.

Alexander Hamilton was a slave trader. He disdained popular rule, unequivocally endorsing authoritarianism in both public and private. His signature achievement was to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few over the many, which was achieved in part by blocking payouts to veterans of the Revolutionary War.

Taking from the poor and giving to the rich does not seem like the stuff of which folk heroes are made. But it perfectly encapsulates the baffling moment in liberalism that peaked in the Obama era. Like Hamilton, President Obama's most definitive achievement lay in the preservation of the financial order—the one whose collapse touched off his rise to power. The banks, themselves responsible for their downfall along with the millions of people who depended on them, were saved. The people were not.

Again, seemingly not exploits worthy of song. But to many, it was blissful heroism. Despite our much ballyhooed polarization, an easy alliance was made between left and right—for the people who were telling the story.
​

Everybody who was anybody saw Hamilton and saw themselves in it. Everybody who was nobody did not.

I know because I'm nobody. I know because most everybody is. But that's not a story to tell, because it's not there.

One of the strangest of feelings that goes along with your story not being told is that you never get to know if it was worth telling. Something that doesn't exist isn't good or bad; it isn't even worthless. It does not rise to the judgment of worth, because it is never seen to begin with.

At root this has commonality with all things. Just because most everybody thinks something is good doesn't mean that it is. I saw ‘Avatar’. And just because nobody sees the worth in something doesn't mean it has none. I could say Van Gogh, but I'd rather think of the unadopted orphan, never loved but never unworthy of it, because all human beings and their stories have worth, and it is not a matter of art history. But whatever life we lead, and whatever love we find, it is common to all we beating hearts to never know for sure.

In the aftermath of a crisis that left a generation gutted and millions of homes emptied to houses, Main Street was safely afar as Wall Street, K Street, and Pennsylvania Avenue found their paths safely converging on Broadway. Torture Republicans like Dick Cheney sat side by side with bankster Democrats like Timothy Geithner, and surrounded themselves with eager court performers like Lena Dunham to revel in our riches, cultural and monetary, which in Hamilton are harmoniously intertwined. They celebrated the founding of America and banks in the same delighted breath, with Americans, as always, left a footnote to the story of a hero's greatness.

There was a time I believed that all the sticky unmoving conservatism of this and other nations, the worship of money, the ethic of sameness, the fearing of God, and all the other trappings of remaining as we were seemed like madness. So much of what we have done seems, at the least, to require building upon, not driving down.

But there is a genius to America in its madnesses that never fails to inspire over the long run, even if it bewilders at the onset. Whatever it has not achieved, America has stood as a democratic republic, the first of its kind, for nearly a quarter of a millennium. I am lost to the possibilities of democracy, lovefallen to the hope that there is godly love between us. But I've lived long enough to know how much that love can be confused, and broken, and even destroyed. Things cannot be built if they don't hold together, and however high the city on the hill may be built, bricks do not stand without mortar.

Taking the money of veterans to build a modern financial system, funneling our riches to the few in order that the polity may be sustained in stern verticality, keeping the banks the banks so that a storm might be weathered and a relative peace might be achieved—these are all things I can countenance in a world as imperfect as our own. But the walls that protect us are not built of mortar, whatever the necessity may be; they are built of bricks. And if some are to be buried so that the building may rise, it only makes sense to give our gratitude to the bricks. The mortar may sit easily on the wall, but the stories belong to them.
​

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

The words of a prophet, and rightly enough, borrowed from another. The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of peace, and a figure of healing. We like to remember him that way, for his serene conviction that good would win.

There are other things he said, and other things he did. He took to the streets. He condemned violence in all its forms, even for the wars fought in America's name. He insisted that true equality was not just a state of mind, but a state of means—that poverty could not be countenanced in a just land. He was not just a man of peace. He was a soldier of love. But of course he also said someday, on the red hills of Georgia. He sought healing, which was a great and noble thing. But it must be earned.

Barack Obama always insisted that progress came slowly, and that gains must be measured, and that conversations needed to be had. Near the close of his presidency, he wrote an essay maligning those progressives who might seek to reign in the banks and their sticky moneyed interests, or those populists who were appealing to “a vague desire for change.” And yet a vague desire for change was all he ever had, within and without. Listening to him speak, to those who had heard only what was left echoing in our fallow world, could be inspiring. But if the words of the prophets were with you, it had more in common with the sight of a figure skater delivering a pizza.

And most deadening of all was the knowledge that, if there had been money on the line, no one would have found the slowness of progress and the long arc of history an inspiring line to take. A CEO would not get very far with the shareholders this way. But we had no money—only votes. And when the better part of a decade went by with millions still locked away, the neverending war neverending, climate change raining down, and a generation still struggling to draw breath, hopeless change was all that remained.
​

Perhaps it is in the nature of hope to predecease us. It may be that it is the amulet of our youth that goes dark when it has passed. Some of us may sustain it longer, like Mick Jagger's abs, but like Mick Jagger’s abs, it’s not really meant to be. It may even be progress to lose it.

Whoever they are and whatever they do, leaders behave the way all organisms do: they do what they must to survive. They adapt to the landscape in which they find themselves. If they did otherwise, they would not be. Judging how politicians behave is a bit like mocking how penguins walk. In politics, as in the tundra, you have to tread carefully, and kind of hilariously. Survival demands it.

The same is true of stories. We are their imperfect vessels, and they cannot spread through all of us. But we carry them along with us always, and no matter who we are, they may yet live. And we can make ourselves clearer to them, as water.

Follow our drops to the ocean, and you find a great transparent mystery, bright and dark at once. The day came when I finally did write a great story—not about me, but about the great story. I thought it needed to be heard. But I am a drop, and the story is the ocean, and sooner or later, the ocean will always be heard. I have breath, but it is borrowed from the wind.
​

The argument for economic suffering as the prime mover of Trump’s rise to power has been soundly rebuffed. At base is the fact that poor people don‘t vote in force. This seems to me, in itself, an eviscerating indictment of our democracy, but put that aside for the moment. The people who did vote, controlling for all the vagaries of gerrymandering, the electoral college, and the fact that Trump didn’t win the most votes, voted in Trump. Much has been made of the idea that it spoke to pain. But by and large, it has also rightly been pointed out, the people enduring the most pain of all—immigrants, people of color, the poor—voted for Clinton. To these people, and to decent people of all stripes, the suggestion that Candidate Trump appealed most to people’s suffering was outrageous.

We never know how hard it is for people to be in their own minds, in their own worlds. And it has no more logic to it than why we don’t build toilets. It is a messy, unfair affair, drained of all worldly perspective.

The poet who wrote of an America that’s never been and yet must be was Langston Hughes. He wrote a story once called ‘Why, You Reckon?’. In it, a poor man mugs a rich man, whose chief reaction to the theft is elation. He is delighted that he has the story of the mugging to tell. The poor man can not grasp how such a man and so many of the men like him, with all the power they have to shield them from the cold, still weren’t happy.

Money is life’s blood; there is no denying it. And its absence is a sickness that can make us suffer and kill us. From the perspective of a social administrator vying for policy solutions to our many ills as human beings, putting dollars in hands is about as good and practical a solution as can be found.

But we are not blood alone. And our words and our deeds do not simply reflect the condition of our blood. We have more than water in us. We have electricity. The pull of that electricity—towards each other, towards comfort, away from what we fear—can shape the world nearly as much as the flow of water. Water flows from the sky to the ocean and back up again, but storms rage with lightning too—and fire can sweep our lifewater away.

We never know the storm behind people’s eyes; what they are enduring even in the simplest of everyday moments. Empathy can easily extend to the suffering that we see—to the water seeping out of us. But we don’t see when people are burning. We don’t see their lightning, even when it’s beautiful and bright. Our moments of epiphany, of despair, the moments that carry us through and the ones that bring us to the brink, are dark to everyone else. And they are not brought on in any force diagram that can be charted on graph paper, with a reaction to an action in a line. It is hopelessly beyond our understanding to know what the experience of consciousness is really like for all those we love or don’t. We can reach out to them and try, or we can be repulsed by them and find recourse in the x note of evil—and I do not deny as some do that evil is real. But all the things that we do are artifacts of our minds, and our minds are darkness in fog.

Put in the language of social science: the capital of our lives is more than money. We can be destitute of capital of all kinds, and that destitution can be wholly definitive of our minds. Losing a loved one is not a loss registered on our political selves, but it can blacken the world through. Being friendless, feeling worthless, being wired to despair the condition of being alive are things that cannot be weighed out in gold, but they can impoverish us entirely. Trump may not have capitalized on the poverty of our bodies, but rather on the poverty of our spirits. And as great American films and our government’s Social Capital Project have both shown, wealth begets loneliness. We need each other, but we don’t want each other—and money gives us only what we want.

This can feel like an insult. Americans are taught to believe that poverty of all kinds is their fault. A strong person should be rich; a good person should be happy. But this is not what our souls are trying to tell us. We are not defined by what befalls us, but rather by the face of our love before it.

Love must be found. Love must be found for ourselves, who are worthy of the life we have been given, and meant to be here. Love must be found for the people who suffer and rage and cannot find hope, because hope has been lost to them in the jungle of the world. Love must be found for our neighbors from whom we seek only distance, for the hurt that drives us towards destruction, for the humanity that pushes itself towards ruin. Love must be found for the flower yet to grow through the earth that will find the hope in itself we have lost. Love must be found for the strength that will protect it from the storm. Love must be found for the wind, wheresoever it blows.
​

As you get older, you begin to lose the poetry of things. You see the numbers instead: how one thing feeds into another, how energy passes between bodies, how heat and light maintain themselves. Eventually you start to believe it’s beyond all mystery. Vanishingly complex, perhaps, but bound by gravity and taxes all the same. Our bodies—politic and otherwise—become waterier to us every year.

For me, for a long time, the poetry of politics went out of me, and it is yet gone. I wrote my story, and it wielded no more power than I did. And I am certainly no prophet, nor ever wished to be. But it is always true, even to the old, that politics is not to be reduced the way so much of our lives can be reduced. It does not shrink so far. The very fact that we attempt it is proof that it is not so.

Politics is not an equation; neither is it poetry. Shelley was no more than half-right in calling poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world—but he was indeed half-right. The poetry of politics is true, whether we wish to see it or feel it or not. What must be must be, but what should be should be as well. The ‘art of the possible’ is a craftsman’s phrase. A poet’s would be this: Politics is where poetry meets prophecy.
​

​What’s happening is change. And people, wondrous people, filled with soul and desire and song, more and better than ever have been on this green earth. Perhaps we have forgotten that nature is within us, but it is filling us up again. And nature does not know death; only change.

The wind is tumbling down the mountain, and we are here to greet it from the placidity of a long winter. We may miss the silence that we brought, that nature granted to us. Yet the mud and the blood and the sweat and the tears and the sea were always there. And what I see now in the fissure is the light shining through. And I don’t feel alone now, or afraid.

I felt that way for so long before the great story unheard. But people can hear now. They care. And as for my own story, I no longer do. These very words are written into the void, but to me the void is the sea. And the sea is never empty; only full.

I don’t know what lies before us, but I know that we don’t know. Whispers can become shouts, and shouts can shake the earth. And there is no more supernatural being this world has ever known than billions of human beings together in the same storm, seeing.

It has all been chaos, but it has all been light. So much light in so many places that we see the things we didn't want to see before, but always needed to. Forced into the light, but choosing to reckon with it. In the ancient words, in our suffering, wisdom—drop by drop upon the soul. We are here, and we see, and dark times do not exist in light of space.

This may be the fall that’s always been, and like the story of Adam and Eve in poetry, before prophecy, we hand in hand with wandering steps and slow will take our solitary way. But there is another story. Maybe it’s spring.
​

4/9/2020