Thank you for this Cristina Breshears! So powerfully, beautifully, compassionately said. I feel such a strong heart-to-heart connection with Cristina. Her writing is a lifeline of courage, truth, integrity, wisdom, resilience, compassion, and fierce love. Inspiration for staying in this world with the eyes of our hearts open. No matter what. Deep bow of gratitude, respect, and love. And may we all do our part in carrying and passing forward the baton.🙏💜Molly
There are days when I go searching through history. Not as part of my current writing project, not to prove I’m right, but to prove that survival is possible. I look for evidence that people have stood inside this kind of state-sanctioned violence, this kind of lying, this kind of moral vertigo, and kept their humanity intact.
What I keep finding instead is time. Years. Decades. Generations. Lifetimes.
Black Americans have been running this relay since 1619. Generation after generation carrying a baton weighted with grief, rage, hope, endurance. So many never saw the finish line. Some never even saw the track. And yet the relay continues, not because victory is guaranteed, but because stopping means surrendering the self. That truth is both devastating and grounding.
The philosopher Albert Camus understood this terrain. He wrote in the aftermath of war, genocide, mass lies, and bureaucratic cruelty. He wrote when it was impossible to pretend that the universe was just or that truth automatically prevailed. A time similar to today. His answer wasn’t optimism. It was lucidity.
"You don’t act because you’re sure you’ll win. You act because not acting would betray who you are."
That line has been holding me up. Because when Renee Nicole Good was killed by ICE agents on her way home, in her own neighborhood, after dropping her child at school, something in me fractured again. The ordinariness of it. The way state violence invaded the most mundane, human moment: going home.
And then the lies. The blatant, shameless lies, despite video, despite the evidence of our eyes and our ears. The insistence that she was a threat, that she didn’t comply, that this is “what happens.” That she was a “domestic terrorist.” So many lies.
Did you know it was only a mile or so from where George Floyd was murdered? A mile from a place that should have taught us something. Instead, we watched the same machinery spin back into motion, smoother now, more practiced, more boldfaced, more insulated from shame.
What hurts almost as much as the violence is the belief in the lies. The way some people cling to them; not because they’re convincing, but because the truth would require reckoning. Because acknowledging what happened would mean facing the systems they benefit from, defend, or identify with. Denial becomes a kind of shelter.
It must feel like a kind of safety to align with those perpetrating the raids, the fear-mongering, the cruel and callous killings. Like proximity will keep anyone safe. And the rest of us are left standing in the storm, watching reality get rewritten in real time.
This is moral injury: the wound that comes from witnessing injustice that violates our deepest values, compounded by the knowledge that institutions meant to protect life are doing the opposite. And asking us to turn a blind eye, to accept it, to applaud it. I keep wondering how many times a human being can absorb this before something essential goes numb.
Camus would tell us: the task is not to become numb. But neither is it to carry the full weight of the world at all times. Absurdism doesn’t ask us to believe things will get better. It asks us to refuse to lie — to ourselves or others — about how bad things are, and still choose to live with integrity inside that truth. Something like: these are hard, hard days. And I will choose kindness.
There are days when the work is not organizing, persuading, or producing something polished or hopeful. Today the work isn’t calling or writing our representatives. There are days when staying alive, staying awake, and staying kind is the work.
Some days, like today (at least for me), carrying the baton means writing sentences that feel as frayed and fractured as my heart. Some days it means telling the truth quietly, even when it costs you comfort. Some days it means resting without surrender. And some days it simply means saying: I see what happened. I will not pretend it didn’t. I will not believe the lie.
We are not meant to finish this relay alone. I don’t think we are even meant to see the end (although I did dream that we one day would see true liberty and justice for all). Instead, I think we are meant to carry it for whatever stretch we can, pass the baton with care, and keep the line from breaking. Lifetime after lifetime. A lifeline.
Renee.
George.
Sandra.
Breonna.
Philando.
Michael.
Eric.
Tamir.
So many names we don’t know.
They are not abstractions. They are the reason the relay matters. I don’t know what justice will look like, or when it will come. Maybe my children will see it. Maybe their children? And I don’t know how many more injuries a conscience can withstand. But I know this: refusing to look away is not nothing. Staying human is not nothing. Carrying the baton, even with shaking hands, is not nothing.
And today, that will have to be enough.
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