Echo from Birmingham Jail

Opening the paper after days offline felt like getting slapped by a blizzard of warnings.

I’ve been offline for a few days, “blacking out the system” and trying to reclaim some peace. Addressing two essential birds with one non-violent stone.

This weekend when I opened the news again, it was like stepping outside in January when the wind slaps your face. Just a couple days’ distance was enough to make the grief and rage blizzarding around us feel even sharper: another school shooting. A young Black college student found hanging from a tree in Mississippi. The fallout from Charlie Kirk’s assassination spiraling into expulsions and purges. Not to mention the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Here’s one thing both sides of the spectrum can agree on: we’re not okay right now. The center is not holding, and our way of life is cracking apart beneath us. And yet, across the spectrum, we are told to pretend things are normal. Don’t agitate; it’ll only cause more trouble.

We are past pretense, kids.

Violence in Our Schools

This week it was Evergreen High School in Colorado. Before that, another town. And another. The names and faces blur, but the pattern is relentless: students, teachers, parents living with the knowledge that classrooms have become hunting grounds. And still, we hear: Now is not the time. Still, the same silence, the same excuses.

Have we normalized the killing of innocent children in their classrooms?

How many times can we stomach this before we admit we’re not okay?

Specter of a Rope

At Delta State University, Demartravion “Trey” Reed was found hanging near campus courts. Police say suicide. His family, his friends, and his community feel the weight of history pressing down on the explanation. Because in the American South, a young Black man’s body hanging from a tree carries a resonance that no quick ruling can wash away.

In the unlikely event it was suicide, it was a suicide shaped by a world where Black grief and vulnerability are invisible until they hang in the open air. And if it was not, then we are staring once again at the face of a terror we pretend was buried long ago.

Silencing the Jokers

We fought a revolution to stop this nonsense.

Comedy is supposed to be the last free space—the mirror that shows us ourselves when no one else will. But now even that space is under assault. Late night shows suspended. Students expelled for words said at vigils. Satire treated as sedition.

This isn’t just about one comedian or one network decision. It’s about the government leveraging fear—the kind that forces people to swallow their truth or risk exile from public life. Call it what it is: King George tactics. And there’s nothing more anti-American than that.

The Letter That We Still Need

Dr. King warned us sixty years ago: the real danger isn’t just open hatred, but the quiet preference for order over justice. Adapted from his Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)

Sixty years ago, from a Birmingham jail cell, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote not to the extremists but to the moderates. To the pastors, the leaders, the citizens who kept insisting: “Wait. Not yet. Don’t make things worse. We’re basically okay.”

King’s answer:

“Justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

His letter was not a plea for patience—it was a rebuke of it. He warned that silence and pretense are not neutral. They are the quiet hand that holds injustice in place.

That letter still speaks. It speaks to the neighbor who shrugs off another shooting. To the university official smoothing over tragedy. To the network executive bowing to pressure. To every one of us tempted to believe survival means pretending it has nothing to do with me.

This affects you. Silence is never neutral. You don’t have to march, but you cannot keep pretending. I mean, you can. But for goodness’ sake, please don’t.

We Cannot Pretend

Pretending we’re okay won’t keep students safe. Pretending won’t bring justice to Trey Reed’s family. Pretending won’t protect the right to speak, to joke, to dissent. Pretending won’t heal a nation that has lost both its memory and its courage.

The truth is, we are not okay. And the longer we pretend, the deeper the fracture grows. So this is where we are: past pretense, past waiting, past the comfort of denial.

We are not okay.

Please stop pretending we are.