Maybe not “the complete final destruction of the world,” but certainly “an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale,” to quote the two definitions in the Oxford Online Dictionary. Not yet, but soon.

This has me wondering: How will we know when we move from pre- to post-apocalypse? This summer, my hometown in southern Oregon was crushed under a heat dome, sweltering in triple-digit temperatures. A fire across the state line ignited and within 24 hours exploded to become California’s largest wildfire this year so far.

The two mountain lakes that provide water to our valley orchards and vineyards are at 2% and 6% full, that is, 98% and 94% empty. Last year, an even more severe heat dome pushed temperatures in normally cool Seattle and Portland to record-shattering levels, wildfires burned more than a million acres in Oregon and 2000-year-old giant sequoias perished in fires of unprecedented severity in California’s Sierra Nevada.

Catastrophic extremes are becoming normal. The Great Salt Lake is at the lowest level ever recorded, spawning toxic dust storms. A mega-drought has shriveled the Colorado River, with the beginning of major cutbacks in water deliveries to Arizona and Nevada. Elsewhere in the West, flooding devastated Yellowstone National Park in June, collapsing roads and leading to the evacuation of over 10,000 visitors.

Widening our view, Dallas is currently inundated with what is described as a “1,000-year” flooding event, following similar flooding disasters in Las Vegas, St. Louis and Kentucky earlier this summer. Across the Atlantic, Europe was scorched by the highest temperatures ever recorded this summer, triggering massive wildfires, the collapse of a glacier in Italy and over 10,000 heat-related deaths. India, China, and Japan experienced record heat waves this year.

I could go on, but no doubt you have read the news, too, about climate-caused apocalyptic events. Closely related is the global extinction crisis, with over a million species at risk by the end of this century. Bird populations in the United States have collapsed by one-third in the past 50 years, and the world’s most diverse ecosystems, including tropical rainforests and coral reefs, could largely disappear in coming decades.

Let’s also not forget the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed at least 6.46 million people worldwide and sickened 597 million. That pandemic shows no sign of ending as the virus continues to evolve new variants. Meanwhile, the new global health emergency of monkeypox has been declared. And polio, once eliminated in this country, is back, thanks to people who aren’t vaccinated.

What about America’s social fabric? According to a poll taken this summer by the New York Times, a majority of Americans surveyed now believe that our political system is too divided to solve the nation’s problems. The non-profit Gun Violence Archive has documented 429 mass shootings so far this year in America, with “mass shootings” defined as at least four people killed or injured.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has led to a rapid and stark division of the country into states that permit abortions versus those that outlaw it. Republicans and Democrats increasingly live in separate media universes, with both sides concerned about the possibility of a civil war.

I admit this is a staggering list of “damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale,” but I’m not ready to declare myself a citizen of the post-apocalypse. We don’t have to live there. Instead, let’s accept that humanity and the whole planet are “apocalypse-adjacent.” The apocalypse is before us and we can see it clearly. But the world is not yet ruined.

Human beings do have this redeeming and also infuriating trait: We are at our most creative and cooperative when it is almost too late. We can — we must — pull each other back from the brink. To fail is to condemn our children to live in the hellscape of a dystopian video game. As they will tell you, that is no place to be.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a naturalist and writer in Ashland, Oregon.

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A trio of bull bison — each a ton on the hoof — fed on bunchgrass. I watched my son’s eyes grow wider as one of the bulls approached our truck, as if it might want to rub off its winter coat on the fender.

Not long ago, the Bison Range visitor center would have given my family a history of the place by focusing on Theodore Roosevelt, America’s 26^th president and founder of the National Bison Range. Now, that story is getting a much-needed makeover.

TR still captivates the American imagination, as demonstrated by the recent Ken Burns miniseries on PBS. In particular, Roosevelt has been lionized by conservationists. He helped rescue American wildlife from extinction after the market-hunting bloodbaths of the 1800s, created the first national wildlife refuge, and signed the Antiquities Act that enabled the creation of national monuments.

More than any other elected official in U.S. history, he made conservation a household word. Americans were so grateful we carved his face on a mountain.

But that ignores the rest of his legacy. Roosevelt was also a white supremacist who believed that whites were meant to rule the world. His views on race warped his policies, both foreign and domestic. It’s easy to dismiss this dark side of Roosevelt as reflecting the norm for his era, but he was behind the times even in his times.

This contradictory man was someone who knew birds by their songs and wrote bestsellers about the beauty of nature. Yet he also threw around racial slurs and used pseudo-science to justify his racist policies.

So, what are we to make of this today? Is TR a hero for being a trustbuster, savior of the Grand Canyon and the egret? Or did he set destructive policies for a century to come? Perhaps both are true.

Case in point: The huge bison that thrilled my son. Before 1776, tens of millions of bison roamed North America. But by the time Teddy Roosevelt was a young cowboy in the Dakotas in 1883, only a few hundred animals still lived in Canada and this country, somehow avoiding the mass slaughter that accompanied Manifest Destiny. After Roosevelt shot one of the last lonesome bison, the death is said to have sparked a change in him, spurring him to become a conservationist.

But there is more to that story. Indigenous people had created deep cultures of conservation that predated Columbus. In Roosevelt’s day, tribes were desperate to save the bison and their way of life. It was Indigenous people, such as Sam Walking Coyote and Michael Pablo, who helped rescue a small herd of bison from Saskatchewan, and brought them back to the Flathead Reservation.

President Roosevelt also wanted to restore bison, and as president in 1908, he created the National Bison Range by taking 18,500 acres out of the Flathead Indian Reservation. But this action ignored the wishes of the Salish, Pend Oreille and Kootenai people, who had been forced to live there since 1855. What’s more, the bison refuge was run not by the tribes, but by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which mostly inflated Roosevelt’s role in the story and dismissed those of Native Americans.

But history has written a new chapter. Congress in 2020 moved to return management of the Bison Range to the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes, and this May, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland visited the Bison Range to take part in a celebration of that long-awaited change.

The return of the Bison Range to the Tribes is a “triumph and a testament to what can happen when we collaboratively work together to restore balance to ecosystems that were injured by greed and disrespect,” said Haaland at the ceremony.

It has taken decades, but a historic wrong has been righted. All we had to do was look honestly at history and one of our conservation heroes.

Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is senior program director at Resource Media in Kalispell, Montana

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We’ll hear about great Black jazz musicians like Duke Ellington and about barrier-breaking athletes like Jackie Robinson. Most have become household names. There will be quotes galore from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

But there are forgotten and fascinating people we also ought to learn about, such as Bass Reeves, one of the first U.S. marshals appointed to the Indian Territories. He served for 32 years in that capacity, making over 3,000 felony arrests and killing 14 men in the process.

Upon his death in 1910, he received a backhanded tribute in the Muskogee Phoenix: “And it is lamentable that we as white people must go to this poor, simple old negro to learn a lesson in courage, honesty and faithfulness to official duty.”

Another person to learn about is Matthew Henson, a courageous Black American who dragged an ailing Robert Peary across the finish line on a sled, making Henson technically the first human ever to reach the North Pole. Yet it was Peary who was lauded and promoted to rear admiral, while Henson was given an honorary burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Then there’s Mary Eliza Mahoney, who, in 1879, became the first Black American to earn a professional nursing license. Unable to get a job in public nursing because of discrimination, she worked as a private nurse, and in 1908, co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses.

You will find Black people threaded throughout our complex history, and that is what bothers me about Black History Month: Why does America need a special month to acknowledge that Black Americans are truly a part of our story? Why, in many colleges and high schools, might Black history be taught as its own course, yet when it comes to courses in “American history,” Black involvement is mostly confined to the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement? Don’t we belong here?

Maybe Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was just confused recently when, after Senate Democrats failed to pass a voting rights act, he said, “African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” McConnell said he made an inadvertent mistake.

I look forward to a time that we celebrate Black Americans’ full inclusion in the American Dream of democracy and nation building, even if that history includes painful episodes that make us cringe today.

We have had a long fight for rights that we still do not enjoy, like full, unrestricted voting privileges. The recent move of some states to decrease access to the polls seems a throwback to the Jim Crow wave of discrimination that followed the Civil War.

If I seem grouchy, I plead guilty. But what I reckon when I read about the past is that it’s been 157 years since the end of the war that freed Black slaves, 68 years after Brown vs. Board of Education mandated equal education for Blacks, 58 years after the Civil Rights Act assured all people equal rights under the law, and 57 years after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which assured everyone the right to vote. Yet here we are, still on the margins of acceptance.

I want us to acknowledge that Black Americans are a part of the American story, along with its villains and heroes, its quirky individuals, and its ordinary and often conflicted citizens. Black Americans should be woven into the narrative because, in fact, Black Americans helped shape the American story, fighting in world wars, pressing for basic rights and working every job they could get in the face of discrimination.

When that’s finally accepted, we can let February find something else to tell stories about.

Wayne Hare is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org. He is a retired backcountry ranger, current wildland fire manager, journalist, and founding director of the civilconversationsproject.org.

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I’ve driven Interstate 15 in Utah dozens of times over the course of two decades, travelling from my home in western Colorado to one of my favorite adventure playgrounds in Zion National Park and nearby. The route takes me through Saint George, Utah, an area referred to as the state’s “Dixie.”

There are a lot of Utah Dixies, though there’s movement to change some names: Dixie National Forest, Dixie State University, and Dixie Downs Drive. Saint George is a retirement community, and Chamber of Commerce signs on the highway extoll the many virtues of retiring to the Dixie area.

But here’s what I notice: Every sign, no matter how often it gets replaced, always features white couples.

I used to ski patrol at one of the Aspen ski resorts. Every year the Aspen Skiing Company would unveil a new marketing campaign, and employees were required to attend a meeting to see what the company would promote that year. Ads and movies featured many hundreds of happy people — happy white people.

I met with the senior executive VP of marketing and pointed out that he was sending a message to folks that Aspen was a playground for whites only. Twenty years later, the Aspen Skiing Company, a company with the best of intentions in advocating for and creating racial justice, still does not include any Black images in its advertising, so ingrained is the image of skiers being white. And full disclosure: The Aspen Skiing Company has engaged me to help them with their mission and advocacy. 

A few years ago I toured the national capitol in Washington, D.C. The tour ended in the rotunda where the guide proudly drew our attention to a huge ceiling painting and border sculptures that had plenty of room to capture key moments in the development of the nation: Brave-looking white guys astride ferocious looking white horses. Chinese railroad workers. Noble “savages,” aka Indigenous peoples. Men, woman and children trekking the Oregon Trail.

But what wasn’t there, in a building built with Black labor, was any depiction of a Black American.

When we sing the national anthem, if we get to the third verse, we pay tribute to slavery even there. The man who wrote this ode to freedom owned human beings who never experienced the freedom that Francis Scott Keys wrote about.

When we were very young, all of us were taught about George Washington’s father’s cherry tree, and the “Father, I cannot tell a lie” story. But most of us learned on our own, years later, that the father of our country owned slaves. But his slave-owning isn’t the odd part. The odd part is that we perpetuate an unimportant lie and neglect an important truth about the father of our country.

On our $20 bill we honor a ruthless slave-owner. In an ad headlined “Stop the runaway,” which Andrew Jackson placed in the Tennessee Gazette in 1804, he promised to pay not just $50 for the return of his escaped slave, but also “ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of 300.” I will be glad to see Harriet Tubman’s face replace Jackson’s on the bill after a long fight to get this done. 

And every Black person has had the experience of waiting in some check-out line, only to have a white person cut into the line right in front of them. In a sense, it’s not even rudeness. America has made us invisible.

So now, here we are… a country tearing itself apart with hate, distrust and dysfunction. Over time I’ve come to realize that racism, intentional or not, is the ladle that stirs this dangerous, unpleasant brew. Do we want a better country for everyone? Recognize racism. Fight it. We’re all in this together.

Wayne Hare is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a retired park ranger, manages wildland fires, and is a decorated U.S. Marine. He writes from Grand Junction, Colorado, and is co-founder of TheCivilConversationsProject.org.

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 Archie Bunker stayed in Queens, where a “bar was a man’s castle,” while daughter Gloria and son-in-law “Meathead” tried to help Archie grasp hippies and anti-war protests.

 We called ours the “back to the land” movement, and we chuckled with Meathead as Archie Bunker got chuckles from our dads. But we were done watching “Leave it to Beaver” and “Ozzie and Harriet.” Our flexible families were radically changing.

 Well, the family has changed again, and, I’d argue that my own, occasionally dysfunctional family is closer to what’s happening in America now than either of the television versions of the past.

 In 1965, I joined the Peace Corps and went to Turkey, where I spent most of the next five years. I’d grown up in Minnesota and California, child of immigrant families from Germany and Norway. In Turkey I met a Peace Corps volunteer from Pennsylvania whose own family roots traced to Italy and Poland. We married and moved to rural northeast Oregon in 1971, just as Archie was hitting the airwaves.

 As the Vietnam War dragged on, adoption services began bringing mixed-race Vietnamese children to the United States and then poor children from India and Central America. Simple American adoptions had only recently come out of a closet  — historically they were hush-hush affairs with unmarried mothers going to visit faraway aunts and doctors quietly arranging adoptions.

 In 1976, we adopted a one-year-old white boy born in New Jersey and brought to Oregon by a mom too young and poor to raise him. In 1983, we adopted a boy from Calcutta, estimated to be six.

 We thought all we needed was love, to bring these kids into the American mainstream. We didn’t realize that kids bring past trauma with them. We also didn’t imagine that being brown in eastern Oregon would be so hard.

 The white son had his next bout with trauma when a classmate committed suicide in his presence. He transferred schools, became a star athlete, went to college — and struggled. He joined the Navy, and married a woman whose father served in Vietnam and whose mother is from the Philippines. Their  road seems smooth right now.

 Color wasn’t an issue when the kids were young, but as our brown boy hit junior high, conscious and unconscious racial slurs got louder. He got the “N word” more than once, transferred schools twice, and at 18 moved to Portland; he didn’t graduate from high school. He had babies and couldn’t manage them, so I raised a mixed-race grandson and granddaughter in eastern Oregon.

 Again, early years were easy, but racial slurs murmured in school hallways and on athletic fields made their high school years hard. “How’s being black?” wrote a classmate in my grandson’s yearbook. His friendships withered and he took out anger on the football field. His sister graduated online and moved away.

 I did not realize how isolated they both felt until my grandson went to nearby Eastern Oregon University. There, the student body is 25 percent non-white. He loves college.

 Their father, born in Calcutta, has found a life and a wife in Phoenix, Arizona. She is an immigrant, too, from Uganda, and they and their two year-old son came to visit us one Christmas. There was apprehension on all sides: If brown gets noticed in small-town Northeast Oregon, what will the locals do with this new Indian-African family?

 The two year-old stole everyone’s hearts, at home and in town, and the grandkids I raised are beginning to understand their father’s hard journey as they begin their own adult journeys in a rapidly changing America. Even Eastern Oregon is growing multi-colored with Mexican and Thai restaurants, students from across the world, and the resurgence of American Indians.

It won’t be easy, but my grandkids, brown and black, representing the heritage of four continents and one island nation, are gaining confidence. They will grow my family tree in directions my German-Norwegian-American grandparents, parents — and Archie Bunker — would never have imagined. 

 This is what America is becoming, and it’s a good thing.

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 Over 2,800 houses, mobile homes and apartment units were destroyed, representing much of the low-income housing in our increasingly expensive valley.  Three people were killed. The story was repeated across Oregon this fire season, and at its peak almost a million acres burned across the state. Some 500,000 people were forced to flee or were under evacuation warnings.

 These fires became so widespread because strong, dry winds sent flames racing to devour fuel wherever it could be found.  And fuel could be found everywhere this year: in mountain forests parched from a winter of drought and a summer of record-breaking heat, in eastern Oregon’s sagebrush country, and yes, in mobile home parks and residential neighborhoods.  Under these conditions, any fire seemed ready to explode into a major disaster. 

 As a member of the southern Oregon community, I felt stunned and heartbroken by the devastation these fires left behind. But, as a conservation biologist, I was not surprised.  For many years, scientific modeling predicted a future of reduced snowpack, hotter summers and drastically increased fire danger in Oregon. The present we are now enduring is the climate-change future that we have been warned about for decades. 

 Tragically, a different kind of conflagration also smoldered in Oregon, one fanned by hatred and division.

 Two weeks before the fires, my valley experienced an ugly racial confrontation.  Like most of Oregon, the Rogue Valley is overwhelmingly white. Still, we have Black Lives Matter support groups, and one of them, the Southern Oregon Coalition for Racial Equity, planned a community forum in the tiny town of Rogue River.  The purpose of the event was to invite local residents of color “to share their experiences and educate the community on systemic racism.” It was to be followed by a family-friendly barbeque, to which everyone was invited.

 Unfortunately, in the toxic atmosphere of social and racial division that is daily fanned by President Trump and right-wing media, this community event was seen as a threat by local “patriot” groups, which descended on the town heavily armed. For hours, these angry people screamed curses and threats at the small group of coalition supporters, while some tried to provoke physical confrontations. Coalition supporters, fortunately, had the discipline to remain calm while resisting.

 Then, in the aftermath of the Rogue Valley fires, this social pathology flared again. Rumors began to fly on social media that the fires were deliberately set by “antifa,” which is not an organized group, feeding more fear and paranoia. These rumors tied up 911 lines and interfered with critical fire-response activities.

 After forceful denials by local law enforcement, the antifa rumors died down, and the Rogue Valley seemed to unite in response to the tragic fires.  A spontaneous brigade of bicycle riders ferried supplies to victims in the burn zone.  Dozens of local organizations mobilized to offer shelter, food, water, clothing and emergency funds to displaced families.

 But conspiracy theory-fueled paranoia is not so easily overcome. Its next target was a “tent city” that sprang up in a park in Medford, the valley’s largest town.  Residents of the tent city included low-income people burned out of their homes and homeless people who formerly camped along Bear Creek, another area consumed by the fire.

 In short order, a Medford City Council meeting was packed with outraged citizens, with some spouting ugly theories that many of the tent-dwellers had been “bused in from other towns with help from antifa,” according to the Medford Mail-Tribune. Some of the protesters threatened vigilante action to “take care of the problem.” A week after the city council meeting, Medford police dismantled the encampment and evicted the residents. 

 Who benefits from this trumped-up rage? Only those whose grip on power is served by fomenting fear and chaos. The future will challenge us all.  Those who work to divide us are simply fanning the flames.

 Our valley has plenty of divisions, but also incredible strength and generosity. Community spirit is shining through as we begin the hard work of recovery. The only way to survive wildfire, to survive COVID, to survive climate change, and to survive vigilante hatred, is to work together for the common good.  Let us hope that this terrible year teaches us that lesson at last.

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People usually just look at me with polite skepticism. And I get it. How do you explain racism when it is so subtle and ingrained that it became invisible to white people generations ago?

When Washington politicians cut back on social welfare and safety net programs, it affects poor blacks more than any other group. Is this intentional racism? Or just an unacknowledged bias that comes from living and working in a city that is overwhelmingly black and poor, leading legislators to believe that safety net programs affect not their own constituents, but only poor “lazy” blacks?

After all, in 2011 the DC black unemployment rate was almost 21% while the white unemployment rate was a mere 3.7 percent. What could account for that other than laziness? Those people don’t need safety nets, they just need to get to work!

Do cops start their shift intending to jack up a poor black? Derek Chauvin who took a knee to George Floyd’s neck looked as nonchalant as if he merely had his foot on a cockroach. Did he even recognize that he was killing an actual human being?

How many jokes compared the Obamas to monkeys? Beverly Whaling, mayor of Clay, Virginia, referred to Michelle Obama as “… an ape in high heels.” Maybe Chauvin, instead of being a racist cop hell-bent on killing black people, simply didn’t see Mr. Floyd as “people.” Just some kind of an ape.

But racism is here. It’s everywhere. It was there when Jim Cooley carried a loaded assault weapon into the Atlanta airport and simply went about his business, no problem. But when John Crawford, a black man, picked up an air rifle that he was considering buying for his son in an Ohio Walmart, he was promptly shot dead.

It was there when Ronald Reagan announced his run for the presidency from the Philadelphia, Mississippi, state fair, the same town where three civil rights workers were murdered by the local sheriff and others 16 years earlier.

American racism was there when the NFL conspired to deprive Colin Kaepernick of his livelihood because he placed his knee on the ground during the singing of the National Anthem, a song of freedom written by a virulent slave owner that nods to slavery in the third verse. He was protesting the kind of violence that later ended Floyd George’s life.

It was there before Derek Chauvin choked George Floyd to death in Minneapolis, and when former New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo choked Eric Garner to death on the streets of Staten Island.

And it was there in Los Angeles in 1976 when Adolph Lyons was pulled over for driving without a tail light, yanked from his car, handcuffed and then choked. When he regained consciousness he was lying on the street, spitting up blood and dirt, gasping for air, and losing control of his bodily functions. He was issued a traffic violation for a minor offense and released.

When his law suit against the police department reached the supreme court seven years later, and the court sided with the police, an astonished and furious Thurgood Marshall wrote a dissenting opinion: “Although the city instructs its officers that the chokehold does not constitute deadly force, since 1975 no less than 16 persons have died following the use of a chokehold by an LAPD officer. Twelve have been Negro males…”

And now, the Coronavirus, which kills Americans who are inflicted with the dangerous pre-existing condition of being black in America in far greater numbers than it kills white people. Combine that with the murders of George and Breonna and Amaud and the covers of the “everywhereness” of American Racism have been yanked back. Racism is exposed yet again and white Americans are finally mad as hell.

I sense that they are angry not only because of the injustices they see on video, but also because they sense that the customs and institutions and traditions that maintain the hurt of racism, hurts them as well.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…where all men and woman are created equal…give me your tired, your poor, yearning to breathe free…with liberty and justice for alI. I think white Americans are figuring out that that’s the country they want to live in. Not this one. They’ve been gamed, and they’ve joined Black Americans in their anger. Racism is suffocating, and finally, ain’t none of us can breathe.

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We’re no strangers to injustice here, where societal woes too often land on Native American shoulders, and no strangers to inequality, where upmarket vacation homes overlook the many school kids in need of lunch assistance. And we have our share of political divides, tempered a little by the “live and let live” culture of the West — or maybe just diffused by her wide open spaces.

Yet even in our community, confrontation is upon us. Protests beget counter-protests, emotions run high, things happen.

What happened here was nothing like the incident in Buffalo, New York, where a 75-year old man fell and was badly injured because police shoved him backwards. When an officer went to the victim’s side, he was pulled back into formation; after those who had engaged with the man were suspended, their whole unit resigned in protest.

What happened here was also different from what we had seen earlier in Coral Gables, Florida; there, when marchers reached the police station, officers were waiting on the steps; a dialogue took place, followed by a prayer where the police joined protesters in taking a knee.

What happened here was much less dramatic. On a fine afternoon in the pretty ski town of Whitefish, a group was gathered to raise signs of support for Black Lives Matter. One large angry man descended on the scene, cursing in people’s faces and grabbing at signs, as the group chanted “Peaceful! Peaceful!” Within minutes a policeman had escorted the man from the scene.

But amid the commotion, one image burns bright: We see the intruder from behind, towering over a young black woman, as he gets in her face. Her sign, “Say Their Names,” has dropped to her side, but her feet are planted firmly. She has just put up her sunglasses, meeting his assault with a steady, silent gaze. Though the encounter lasts only a moment, the impression is enduring.

Her name is Samantha Francine, and she embodies the change we need. As we adjust to life under pandemic, it is time to accept that yet another plague is upon us, and that is the disease of dehumanization. We condemn first and ask questions later — or never. We judge on sight, we dismiss and damn; we polarize and partisanize until the rift has grown so wide there is no reaching across.

We’ll use almost any story to justify our rage, like the claim that blood running from the ear of the old man lying on the sidewalk in Buffalo was a cleverly staged with tubes, or that the Coral Gables protest was illegitimate because A, it wasn’t black-led, and B, the group had communicated with police in advance. (Organizer Oshea Johnson laughed and said he’s been black since birth, but yes; when the police called, they talked — and in a hopeful sign, are still talking.)

Samantha just held her ground, looked the man in the eye, and listened.

She explained why: “I grew up with a single white father who taught us from a young age that things were going to be different for us just because of the color of our skin. He would constantly remind us that ‘no matter the threat, always look them in the eye so they have to acknowledge you’re human.’ In this moment, those are the words that went through my head. When I lifted up my glasses, he saw me. I saw him.”

From the news, it’s easy to think that the revolution under way is only taking place in cities. But like coronavirus, this other plague is everywhere — most obviously online, in Twitter feeds and Instagram comments — but most dangerously, headed for our hearts. Mine too, I fear, which is why I am writing this, and why I am leaning on Samantha’s stance for strength.

Swipe-and-judge is here, and it’s going to take more than a mask to cure.

So let’s stop, plant our feet, look each other in the eye and listen to one another. Wherever we do so, be it Buffalo, Coral Gables, Whitefish, or our own back yard, that might be the revolution that really matters.

.

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