We can be fearless in proclaiming that we are afraid—afraid of what is happening, afraid of what might come, afraid of becoming numb to it all.

It could be any morning up here on the mountain. Any season. The light spills over the valley like it’s been rehearsing for centuries, finding its way to the deck that I sanded and painted myself. Ruby’s already made her first round of the yard, nose to the wind, tail announcing that all is well in our little dominion—hers and mine and Gary’s.

From the outside, it might look like the middle of nowhere. But to us, it’s home. It’s our mountaintop oasis. It speaks peace. It speaks love. It knows both.

And yet—I am afraid.

I’m not afraid of dying.

I’m not afraid of the questions at my annual doctor’s visit—how’s the sleep, how’s the balance, any falls lately? I know the drill, know the tone. It’s the small talk we make with time itself.

I am afraid of more than that. Much more.

I am afraid of living.

I am afraid when I watch our nation take one step, then another, back and back and back toward what too many call the “Good Ole Days.” Days that weren’t always that good in reality—at least not for everyone. I’ve seen real progress during my seventy-seven years, hard-won and deeply felt. But now I know what it feels like to watch it slip away.

I am afraid when I see the National Guard deployed to American cities—unbidden, uninvited—storming in under the cloak of “security,” while local leaders protest and courts rule against the deployment as unconstitutional.

I am afraid when I see streams of homeless men, women, and children forcibly cleared from our Nation’s capital—not relocated, but shamed off the sidewalks, invisible again to the people who run the city.

I am afraid when masked men wearing ICE uniforms sweep through neighborhoods in unmarked vans—when people are grabbed at early hours, dragged from their routines, as children watch from windows.

I am afraid when I see our public health agencies bend—when the CDC overturns or ignores scientific consensus, issuing guidelines that feel political more than medical, eroding trust in what should be shields, not targets.

I am afraid when I see older Americans treated as burdens instead of blessings—when Social Security and food programs are cut under the banner of “efficiency,” when Medicare oversight is weakened and the sickest lose coverage, when senior housing programs vanish from federal budgets as if aging were a mistake. When growing old becomes a liability instead of an honor, a nation has lost its sense of inheritance.

I am afraid when I see poor and working families once again blamed for their poverty—when SNAP and WIC are gutted, when rent assistance dries up, when wages shrink while profits soar. Poverty is being rebranded as personal failure again, as though the system itself weren’t tilting the table.

I am afraid when I see classrooms and libraries turned into battlegrounds—when teachers are monitored, words are banned, and curiosity is treated as defiance. When education becomes indoctrination, the light that should guide us turns inward and burns.

I am afraid when I see our museums stripped of independence—when curators are told which histories to showcase and which to hide, when funding depends on keeping donors and politicians comfortable instead of keeping the record honest. When museums are told what stories to tell, history itself becomes propaganda.

I am afraid when I see the earth itself crying out—when wildfires, floods, and droughts speak the truth our leaders refuse to hear. When those in power in Washington call climate change a hoax, mock science, and dismantle what fragile protections remain—treating the planet not as inheritance but as inventory. The soil, the rivers, the air—they are not ours to own. They are the breath of every living thing that will come after us.

I am afraid when I see our history books rewritten—when the ugliness of our past is softened or omitted altogether, as if truth were a stain to be scrubbed away. I am afraid when textbooks trade context for comfort, when children are taught pride without responsibility. That’s not education. That’s amnesia dressed as virtue.

I am afraid when I see books banned from shelves—works of art, witness, and imagination stripped from students’ hands because someone decided fear should be the curriculum. A nation that fears its own words is a nation already forgetting how to think.

I am afraid when I see faith itself being rewritten—when those who hold the Bible high forget the heart of its message: love thy neighbor as thyself. When “the least of these” are ignored or condemned, when compassion is replaced with control, when the name of Christ is used not to comfort but to conquer.

I am afraid when I see the Department of Defense renamed the War Department—as if we’ve abandoned even the language of restraint, as if the goal were not defense but dominance. Words matter. Change the name, and you change the story. Change the story, and you change what we become.

I’ve lived long enough to see this nation inch closer to its promise, step by hard-won step. I watched the Civil Rights Movement force open doors that had been locked for centuries. I watched women claim the rights and respect they were long denied. I watched same-sex marriage move from silence to law, from whispers to weddings. I watched a Black man take the oath of office as President of the United States and felt, for the first time in my life, that maybe—just maybe—we were learning what equality really means.

And yet, I’m watching so much of that progress being undone in plain sight—rolled back by men who smile as they sign the papers. That’s what eats at me. We came so far. We proved we could change. And now I fear we’re proving how quickly we can forget.

I have one more fear—one that hits closer to home for me than any of the others, and yet it reaches out and encompasses them all.

I am afraid when I see LGBTQ freedoms stripped away in bill after state bill—protections withdrawn, rights revoked, marriages questioned, school policies reversed—while the rhetoric whispers “return to order,” but the victims are many.

It hits me hard, like a gut punch, because I know what it feels like to live quietly on the margins of acceptance. I had a place at the table—as long as I behaved. As long as I laughed at the right jokes. As long as I didn’t speak the truth of who I was. I was welcome, yes—but only in disguise. That was the unspoken bargain: conformity in exchange for belonging. A seat, but not a voice. Presence without personhood.

It took me years to understand that silence isn’t peace—it’s erasure wrapped in politeness. And acceptance that depends on pretending is not acceptance at all. So when I see hard-won freedoms for LGBTQ people being stripped away, I don’t see politics. I see people—people like me—being pushed back into the shadows we worked so long to escape.

I am afraid, too, of the silence that wears love’s disguise. Of families who say they accept us—so long as it’s private. Who love their gay brother or their trans child quietly, behind closed doors, but never speak that love out loud. Because public love takes courage, and private love costs nothing.

I am afraid that if the reckoning comes—and it may—some of us will look around and find that the people who said they loved us privately will deny us publicly.

And I am afraid that the ground is shifting for all of us—that what’s being erased is not just rights, but recognition of value.

I am afraid that we are being bombarded deliberately with so much chaos and confusion that we are forgetting what lies at the core of who we are—as Americans, yes, but more deeply, as human beings: the value of the individual.

The gay and the straight.
The trans and the cis.
The believer and the atheist.
The refugee and the citizen.
The imprisoned and the free.
The Black and the white.
The immigrant and the native-born.
The woman and the man.
The poor and the privileged.
The child and the elder.
The body that moves easily, and the one that cannot.
The mind that remembers, and the mind that forgets.
The one who speaks, and the one who has no voice.
The one who is seen, and the one who is invisible.

Each carries the same sacred value.
Each bears the image of us all.
Leave one behind, and the whole is diminished.
Forget one, and the soul of the people forgets itself.

I am afraid that this forgetting has already begun. It’s not just in Washington, though Washington leads the charge. It seeps into pulpits, classrooms, living rooms—into the quiet corners of our own decency. It’s in the news we scroll past, the cruelty we explain away, the silence we call “staying out of it.”

I am afraid because I see what happens when the faceless stay faceless—when the homeless become numbers, when the refugee becomes a threat, when the trans child becomes a talking point. I am afraid because I know what happens when we stop seeing each other as sacred.

And I am afraid because I’m not sure what I can do.

But I know I have to do something. We all do.

We can vote. We can write. We can reach out to those in power and to those who believe they hold it. But maybe more than any of those things, we can be fearless in proclaiming that we are afraid—afraid of what is happening, afraid of what might come, afraid of becoming numb to it all.

We can name it.
We can put a face to it.
We can be the moral engine of one—
each of us reaching further than comfort,
further than tribe or label—
to hold on to what makes us human,
to reclaim it before it slips away.

One human being girding up another.
One hand extended.
One voice saying, I see you.
That’s where resistance begins.

We can show, by the way we live, that each person matters—every single one. The forgotten, the dismissed, the weary, the silenced. Because the measure of a democracy—like the measure of a soul—is not how it treats the powerful, but how it protects the powerless.

So yes, I am afraid.
But fear, spoken aloud, can become light.
And light, once shared, can become strength.

Maybe that’s where our healing begins:
in the courage to care out loud,
to stand with the one beside us and say,
You are not forgotten.

Because the next person erased could be someone we love.
Or it could be us. You. Me.
But if we stand together—if we keep standing—
it will not be all of us.

⸻ ✦ ⸻ ⸻ ✦ ⸻ ⸻ ✦ ⸻

If this essay speaks to your heart, please like it. Please share it.
Let it travel further than fear—and bring us closer to hope.