So beautifully, wisely, and compassionately said. Deepest gratitude to Cristina Breshears. 🙏💜 Molly
I’ve been sitting with the reaction to that image of Trump depicted as Jesus and the way it seems to have unsettled parts of his religious base in a way so many other things have not.
And I keep coming back to the same quiet question: Why this particular image and not so many others? I’m not asking in anger. Not even in disbelief, exactly. More like… curiosity tinged with grief?
Because I think about the children in detention. The families separated. The people picked up at clinics, at work, during their court appointments, and in the middle of ordinary life.
And I can’t align those violent ICE interactions with “welcome the foreigner.” I read about school lunch funding, SNAP benefits, and food pantry monies being cut, and I can’t reconcile those actions with “feed the hungry.”
How do I make sense of removing healthcare from 1.6 to 1.9 million Americans who’ve already lost Medicaid coverage with “caring for the sick?”
Those are people and not mere abstractions to me. It’s no longer debatable. It just… is. Real people harmed by this administration.
I understand not everyone has had to cross that threshold where something stops being a story and becomes an assault to your soul. And maybe that safe distance some folks have managed to maintain has allowed them to keep from feeling all of this. But this current uproar shows symbols still work over distance and through detachment. How is it we can be moved by a digital image and not by the flesh and blood in our news feeds.
It’s amazing how symbols don’t require proximity. They arrive fully formed. Immediate and undeniable. Symbols act as powerful cognitive tools that transcend physical space and function as immediate, fully formed signals that convey complex meanings without requiring close proximity. They arrive in the mind as ready-made concepts, often triggering instant, undeniable interpretations that bypass slow logical reasoning. An image like this, of a man placing himself in the position of something sacred, it doesn’t need context or explanation. It just smacks hard.
But actual harm is different. Harm travels through distance if we aren't directly impacted. It travels through headlines and counter-headlines. Through numbers that grow so large they begin not to make sense anymore. And somewhere along the way, the most real things (the lives, the bodies, the quiet, human consequences) become the hardest to feel. So often, if we haven’t experienced the harm ourselves or know someone else who has, we don’t relate. We can keep that harm in abstraction.
This is the strange inversion that I’m wrestling with today. That an image can feel more concrete than a person. That a symbol can provoke outrage where suffering does not. Is it easier? Less costly? What do you think of this upside down moment?
And yet… maybe it’s not as strange as it feels. Maybe it’s just human. We respond first to what we can see clearly. To what touches something sacred inside us. To what doesn’t ask us to imagine across distance.
So I find myself wondering (not accusing, just wondering) if something in that image feels to you like it crosses a line… what is that line made of? Reverence? Humility? Truth? A sense that some things should not be claimed or taken or performed?
And if those things matter (and I believe they do) where else might they matter, too? Not just in images. But in actions. In policies. In the way we hold power over other human lives.
I don’t want this to be about catching anyone in contradiction. I think it’s about noticing how we notice. Because maybe the same part of us that recoils at a symbol being disabused is the part that could also recognize harm in an actual person if that humanity were brought close enough to see. And maybe the work — our quiet, slow, human work — is finding ways to close that distance.
*****
(I responded to Cristina's inquires with more of my own related reflections here: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2026/04/reflections-on-extending-light-of.html.)
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