by Tyrik LaCruise
As was so often said in the homes and churches of my childhood, there is nothing new under the sun. The popularity of the name Ezekiel was itself a persistent reminder, a testament at once to the grafted roots of our existence in the Americas and a rejoinder of the prophet himself. It is true, of course, that there is nothing new under the sun. Even from our perch here in the closing months of 2024, so much of our lives and our struggles remain fundamentally the same.
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What happens to our hold on the world if we let go, if only for a moment, of the narcissism of our novelty? For one thing, so many of the distractions around us begin to break apart, so that despite all our present wonders—including the ones that make reading these words possible—the questions before us in this moment remain the same: will we make real a world where we treat everyone around us with dignity, or will we live in one where our differences are weaponized in the name of dishonest strength?
This matters as much politically as it does interpersonally, as much in our everyday lives as it does in our shared civic and public spaces. Whether one agrees with a person’s policy positions or not, it matters whether someone learns to pronounce a person’s name, and more broadly whether they address those persons in the way they’d like to be addressed. It’s a childhood lesson to speak to others the way they’d like to be spoken to, whether that lesson is learned at home, in school, or else on either end of some playground confrontation. It matters, making a choice in the road ahead of us, whether we vote for leaders who can manage to summit that basic principle in their interactions with others. That’s true whether that person is running for president or someone we encounter in our own lives.
Those basic dignities have always been undermined on the basis of our everyday differences, differences that matter no more than the fact that our core hopes, needs, and desires remain the same. The demand for everyday dignity has been at the core of struggles from recent memory to our distant past, from the Civil Rights Movement to our stories inherited through ancient accounts. Regardless of the terms of one’s identity, it matters to each of us whether we are able to live our lives with the respect of the people we encounter in them.
Even now, in 2024, we can all testify to moments where we find ourselves treated as less than those around us, whether ignored or outright minimized. Today as much as ever, one can go into a restaurant and find themselves not served or treated poorly based on assumptions about who they appear to be, unable to spend their money without being looked upon with doubt or derision. As much happened to me earlier this week, dining at a restaurant I’d spent years circling back to. It happens to each and every one of us so much (and for the privileged few only so often) on the basis of race or otherwise. So often in our lives we decide to remain silent. All the same, there are times we cannot allow as much. Fall 2024 is such a time.
It’s true that I recently experienced a familiar indignity in a surprising place. The fact that it happened should be no more surprising than it ever is. All the same, it’s hard not to see what it means amid a domestic and international moment where basic values of dignity and equality are so often under threat. When elected leaders in pursuit of promotion knowingly spread vicious lies about those around us whose great sin is having been born speaking a different language, it’s no surprise that some among us would interpret their dishonorable behavior as a personal invitation to engage in the same. Still, we know better than to imagine that something needs to be a surprise to be worthy of our attention. As much for ourselves as for future generations, it matters whether we opt to stay silent or take the opportunities before us to speak up.
So of course, those of us who are eligible to vote must vote—whether you’ve never done so or are a seasoned veteran—but voting alone is just a part. We all, voters or not, need to take the opportunity before us this Fall to have a long-overdue conversation about the state of the nation and our hopes for the road ahead of us. Once we do, it won’t be long before it’s clear that each and every one of us—regardless of party, race, or creed—hold dreams of a nation where our everyday lives are defined by equality, opportunity, and dignity, not just for ourselves but for our families and communities. Though it’s not always the case, this election cycle offers a clear choice between a leader with a proven track record of fighting for that vision, however imperfect it may be, and a former office-holder who spent his life undermining the possibility of that future at every turn.
I know it, you know it, and everybody knows it: Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are proof perfect that those words from Ezekiel might just be true. There is, at least in the difference between leading with dignity and doing so dishonestly, nothing in life the sun’s light has not already touched. The question before us now is whether we—as individuals and as a nation—should continue to allow that dishonest duo to repackage familiar hatreds through empty claims at offering something new. For this writer the answer, as it’s so often been throughout human history, is a resounding and enthusiastic “no.” My only wonder, reader, is what that answer is for you.
Beyond that, what do you intend to do about it?
