Though I grew up Catholic, I’ve been into many churches of different types and one thing I’ve always noticed is the same sense of relief from the world and the safe space a church can provide.
May you come to see the people you write about as actual flesh-and-blood beings, with goals, feelings, failings and emotions rather than as convenient ciphers to scorn.
I grew up around horses. My family raised them, cared for them, rode them, bred them, trained them, bought and sold them. Back then it was even still legal to go out and catch wild horses and bring them home.
Her life paralleled nearly a century of “givens” in terms of limited opportunities for women, specifically Black women and limited opportunities for African Americans in general.
There isn’t some mass solution to this. It takes individual action. Or inaction: the simplest thing to do when some bit of hate comes your way is to kill it by not passing it on. Not even a little bit.
In 1944, a courageous band of artists at the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt cobbled together a play inspired by the joke—a black comedy entitled The Last Cyclist, in which bicycle riders are blamed for all of civilization’s woes and are hunted down and killed, one by one.