The night has a way of fooling you.
Though it is a temporary condition, it can convince you it is a permanent state: that it will always be this dark, this terrifying, this lightless.
It tries to take away your will.
When you are in its grip, the darkness has a way of making you believe that the sun will never rise again, that you will always feel this way, that you should abandon hope for good.
The key is in staying awake, in not surrendering to the real nightmare visions and the fearful false stories, in persevering long enough to see the light begin to break through, to witness the dawn arriving.
Because it always comes, it will not be denied.
Do you see it?
Do you feel the changing of the light in the room today?
Do you feel the warmth upon your face?
That is morning breaking through.
It is time to greet it.
This is a victorious shout into the wind.
An overdue megaphone blast of long-postponed joy.
It is a clarion call from those whose hearts could take no further breaking.
Today is the beginning of the end of a long, brutal, losing war with the night.
It is the dawn announcing itself in radiant, unapologetic fire.
For a while we may have forgotten what it feels like to be so hopefully ablaze in this way.
The fight will do that to you.
It will wear you out.
It will drain you.
It will suffocate and extinguish all that is lightness within you.
We’d grown so weary and bitter and tired from all of it that we’d almost forfeited the very best of us.
We almost conceded defeat.
We almost resigned ourselves to the bleakest of fates.
We almost consented to the brutality around us.
We almost relinquished our dreams.
We almost abandoned hope.
Almost.
But morning is here.
We are being made new again.
We are a people turning and returning—a revolution in real-time.
We are boldly declaring our independence from the black nihilism they fearmongers trafficked in.
Today is an audacious treason of sorts, a daring defection from the homeland of our recent days.
It is a place that no longer merits our allegiance, and so we run from it joyfully.
We are running toward somewhere better, building something greater.
We’ve seen too much suffering, bound-up too many wounds, buried too many before their time.
We’ve grown exhausted by the violence of venomous words and the destruction it so easily speaks into being.
We are seeking the words and ways that give life.
Today is rebirth, renewal, and resurrection, exploding all around like a Spring of every living thing.
In this blinding and beautiful daylight, we are beginning to rescue something precious that we’d lost.
We’ve seen our nation hijacked by hatred and we have resisted together.
We are reclaiming this place from the hands of the hurtful and restoring to it the brilliant luster that comes only when everyone gets to grab hold of it.
We are ready to begin the difficult, messy, but necessary work of this day, to craft the America that could be but has never yet been.
We are a people reminding one another of who we are: family formed not by homeland border or religious affiliation or political lines or any other distinction or demarcation, but by the sacred kinship of our shared humanity.
Our very blood testifies to the one life that all we walk together in.
And this is the DNA of our joy today.
This is the reason for our expectant hearts, so fully affixed to our sleeves.
This is the reason we will strain to never go back to the dark places and to the hateful words and to the dead-end tombs of the past.
The morning once again reminds us.
This is the truth that overcomes.
This is the love that has the last, loudest word.
This is why we once again find strength and passion and resolve.
This is our manifesto of Hope.
Hope is indeed alive.
It resides within us.
We are that hope, together.
We have always been.
Come alive.
Rise.
Shine.
The morning is coming.
The mourning is ending.
Let’s run together to the dawn.
