“Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at opening day.”
—Isaac Watts
January of 2026 ended heavily with national tension and grief. Not for me personally, and not directly for my family, as we remain relatively untouched by the events unfolding in Minneapolis, Venezuela, and Ukraine. And yet, untouched is the wrong word. We are not spared from the weight of what we are witnessing. In just a few short weeks, this new year has delivered a relentless procession of sorrow, outrage, and unease. Distance does not insulate us from grief anymore. Screens carry it straight into our living rooms, our sanctuaries, our sleepless nights.
My aim here is not to argue policy. No doubt, some of the events we are witnessing may yet yield outcomes that others will call “good.” The removal of Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, for instance, is being celebrated in some corners as a necessary act of international justice. I find myself deeply uncomfortable with the United States executing foreign policy through armed extraction and forced removal, regardless of how reprehensible a regime may be. Nor am I remotely persuaded by the justifications being offered for the immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis, a surge that has already resulted in the deaths of American citizens. But again, policy arguments are not driving this reflection. What I am trying to navigate is something heavier and harder to name: the collective stress, the psychic exhaustion, the moral vertigo that so many of us seem to be experiencing right now.
Carried by the Current of History
As I write this, my social media feeds are filled with commemorations of the fortieth anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. I was fourteen years old when that happened. Like so many others, I remember sitting in my junior high classroom, watching the launch live on television. I remember the sudden silence, the confusion, the teachers scrambling for words they lacked. I’ll risk the cliché because it still rings true: it feels like only yesterday. And yet it also feels as though that moment, and the boy who witnessed it, belonged to an entirely different reality. A different America. A different moral atmosphere.
What we understand now, of course, is that the Challenger disaster was not an accident in the simple sense. It was the result of haste, pressure, and willful disregard. Engineers warned that the unusually cold Florida morning made the O-ring seals brittle and unsafe, but schedules mattered more than caution, optics more than lives. NASA wanted momentum. Leaders wanted a show of confidence. Concerns were noted, then overridden. The shuttle was launched anyway, and within seconds, the system failed exactly where it had been predicted to fail. That story feels uncomfortably familiar today. We are rushing forward as a nation, dismissing warnings, silencing expertise, normalizing risk, and insisting everything is under control while the temperature keeps dropping. We are told to trust the launch, to stop asking questions, to accept the spectacle. And like that morning in 1986, there is a quiet, growing sense that something essential is being ignored, and that once the damage is done, no amount of stunned silence will undo it.
What Will History Say?
If I am fortunate enough to live another forty years, how will this present moment be remembered? How will January of 2026 be judged by history? More uncomfortably, how will we judge ourselves when we look back on this time four decades from now? These are the questions that have been circling my thoughts lately, refusing to land quietly.
I spent an enormous amount of mental and emotional energy during the first Trump administration. I argued, protested, wrote, worried, and watched relationships fracture under the strain. I think I assumed that if it ever happened again, I would be better prepared, more emotionally resilient, less reactive. Instead, this second term feels worse in some ways. Not because it is louder or more shocking, but because there are days when I feel completely overwhelmed by the cumulative weight of what we are witnessing. It is the familiarity of it all that drains me. The sense that we have learned so little. The realization that cruelty no longer even pretends to be exceptional.
When Familiar Cruelty No Longer Shocks
Just a few days ago, wedged between the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a group of protesters disrupted a Sunday worship service at Cities Church in St. Paul. The response was immediate and intense. Much of the outrage came from Christians, who saw the disruption as unnecessary, inappropriate, even criminal. Some went so far as to describe it as a form of terrorism directed at believers.
Let me be clear: my point is not to litigate the legality of the protesters’ actions. Others are already doing that work, and the Trump administration has wasted no time making arrests. What troubles me is the disproportionate outrage. The volume of anger directed at the disruption of a church service stands in stark contrast to the relative silence—or even approval—I see from many evangelicals when lives are disrupted, and in some cases ended, by this aggressive immigration enforcement campaign.
Why does the interruption of a worship service provoke such fury, while the interruption of families, livelihoods, and lives barely registers? Why does sacred space seem to matter more than sacred bodies?
In my attempts to make sense of this, I instinctively reached for the language and stories that had once formed me. I wrote about The Good Samaritan. I wrote about Jesus as someone who welcomed interruption, who consistently allowed himself to be stopped, delayed, and derailed by human need. I pulled every Scripture I could remember, trying to hold up a biblical mirror to those who so passionately defended “law and order” while remaining unmoved by the suffering unfolding in plain sight.
And still, words feel inadequate. They fail to capture what I am feeling, and what I suspect many of us are feeling. A dull ache mixed with flashes of anger. Grief layered with fatigue. A sense that something foundational is being eroded, and that we are being asked—implicitly, relentlessly—to accept it as normal.
I think most reasonable people agree that violent criminals should not be roaming our streets. That is not a controversial position. But kidnapping, harassing, and in some cases killing hardworking immigrants—regardless of their legal status—is wrong. Full stop. Criminalizing people for using their phones, blowing whistles, or exercising their First Amendment rights is wrong. These are not radical claims. They are moral ones.
Bearing Witness in Small Ways
We are all witnesses now. Whether we like it or not, history is recording how we respond. Silence is a response. Outrage is a response. Selective empathy is a response. What we choose to amplify, and what we choose to ignore, will shape how this era is remembered.
What I do in response feels painfully small. I am not on the ground organizing or risking arrest. I am not funding initiatives at the scale others are. What I do is write. I speak. I post. I try to bear witness. I try to make sense of what is happening for my future self and for those who will come after me, so they can ask what it felt like to live through this time. I want there to be some record that not everyone looked away.
That desire to bear witness is rooted in a deeper conviction about memory and loss, one that literature has helped me name. Marilynne Robinson, in Gilead, writes, “Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, all that fear and all that grief were about nothing… But I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.”
What Will Be Worth Remembering
We all felt sorrow forty years ago when the Challenger exploded. I remember being inspired by the spectacle, broken by the loss, and steadied when President Reagan reminded us that the astronauts had “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.” Time carried them away, just as Isaac Watts wrote, like an ever-rolling stream bearing all its sons along. And yet they were not forgotten. The tragedy was avoidable, but dissenting voices were ignored. Have we learned anything?
The question is not whether time will carry these present moments away, because it will. The question is whether, before it does, we will choose to live in a way that makes remembering worth the cost.
Image: Pamela Reynoso
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