Photo by Travis Long tlong@newsobserver.com

Sometimes you don’t notice attrition when it happens.

When you lose elemental parts of you, they don’t all depart at once, and since you’re inside yourself in the daily woundings of this life, you may not feel the thousands of tiny cuts at the time. You may not notice the lifeblood slowly draining from your spirit.

In fact, you might believe you’re who you’ve always been, until something reminds you of the you you used to be.

No Kings Day reminded me.

As I stood shoulder to shoulder with a massive, sweaty army of diverse humanity lining the streets of North Raleigh yesterday, I suddenly found things I hadn’t even realized I’d lost.

I found joy.

There is a silent toll that witnessing so much suffering takes on compassionate people, especially when you work so hard to remain awake and aware. Being reminded every day of just how many human beings are experiencing such wasteful brutality can gradually suffocate the spirit, rendering us joyless. One of the first sounds I noticed as I found myself within the pulsating mass of humanity on that highway was the sound of laughter—and it was my own. I realized it had been a while since I’d heard it like this: easy, constant, booming. The joy was medicinal. It was infectious. This was not a dour, dismal acknowledgement of defeat, as much as it was a joyfully defiant dance party of pissed off people who haven’t let a minority movement of misery make them in capable of jubilation.

One of the goals of authoritarian regimes is to extinguish the lightness from people; to inundate them with a legion of emergencies and nightmares requiring so much energy to confront that they begin to lose the ability to see anything ahead worth pursuing. When optimism dries up, the future becomes a bleak foregone conclusion. I hadn’t realized I had been chronically emotionally dehydrated. That is until once surrounded by a swirling technicolor sea of activists, fighters, healers, helpers, and dreamers in the blazing North Carolina sun, I could feel hope returning within me: not a naive one that denies the gravity of the moment or the reality of the threats, but a hope that refuses to give this ugliness the last word.

I found America.

There’s been a story that’s made headlines in my head lately: the one of this nation’s certain demise; the one where fascism’s presence will be permanent; the one where we are now hopelessly overrun in both the government and our electorate with violent, hateful, cruel people who find joy in the suffering of others. And while there’s no debating that a sizable segment of America certainly fits that description, the vast majority here (those who made their presence unmistakable felt throughout this nation yesterday by the millions), is comprised of beautiful, loving, patriotic human beings who don’t just believe in the idea of America, they embody it. I remembered that during its nearly quarter of a millennium history, this place has always been a crucible of conflict, because the country we aspire to be cannot be incarnated without it.

I found myself again.

One of the greatest tragedies of the last decade is how wasteful it’s all been: the unnecessary emergencies the fear-brokers have generated, the unrelenting assaults on vulnerable people, the never-ending constitutional crises, the stupefying cruelty, and the collateral damage of trying to hold and attend to all of it. I’m not who I was ten years ago, and some of that is a good thing. But yesterday in the streets of our city, I was able to clarify what matters to me, the things and the people worth fighting for, and the kind of human being I want to show up in the world as.

Yesterday won’t magically rewind the clock pre-election and let us have a do-over. It doesn’t suddenly erase the unprecedented damage to our systems and safeguards. It alone can’t bend the arc of the moral universe in any substantial way.

But for me, No Kings Day was a glorious reminder of how powerful joy, hope, diversity, and our individual and collective humanity are in resisting this Renaissance of hatred—and that we are their caretakers.