Survive—together
Cross-posted from Freedom Road.
We no longer have a federal department running education in the U.S. It went poof—overnight, last week.
I still don’t know how to feel.
I don’t mean I don’t know what to feel. On an existential level I feel rage. But it is an out-of- body kind of rage. It’s the primal scream taking place in the parallel universe next to my placid personage, which stares straight ahead, in survival mode, as word trickles down of Social Security already hobbled and presidential Cabinet members planning wars on Signal.
Surviving. That feels like the goal right now. Survival of the self seems like the most important thing right now. If the self doesn’t survive then the cause will be lost tomorrow.
Survive.
I’m reminded of a climactic scene in the film, The Last of the Mohicans. Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Louis), a white man who was taken in and raised by the last Mohican, Chingachgook, sees that their Huron enemies are encroaching. He is trapped under the lip of a crashing waterfall with love interest Cora (Madelyn Stowe), her innocent-as-a-dove sister Alice (Jodhi May), Chingachgook (Russell Means) and his son Uncas (Eric Schweig). Their only escape is to jump into the screaming waterfall, which drops to a river hundreds of yards below. But the women could never survive the jump; encumbered by their 18th century frocks. So, Hawkeye commands Cora to do one thing: “Stay Alive! No matter what it takes! Just stay alive! I will find you.”
I can imagine how Cora felt beneath that waterfall watching the enemy’s torch-light round the bend. I feel that impending sense of doom now as we watch Trump’s illegal executive orders overwhelm this nation with the putrid stench of bile-packed backwash. He is killing everything.
But the death of everything has not registered, yet. We’ve only heard word of lockouts, firings, and defunding. We haven’t had the benefit of a funeral where we face the dead bodies lying all around us. It all lives on in our collective US imagination of a past that has passed. Like the phantom limb, it feels like it’s there, but it is not. When we try to move our hand, it feels like we have a hand, but the hacked limb sits on the soil at our feet—motionless. We feel nothing, because we are in shock. Shock wears off. Then comes the pain.
What kind of pain will we feel when we come out of collective shock? I hear phantom future shrieks and moans rising from under-resourced communities across the country. I see the lifeless listlessness of humans trying to carry on daily routines without enough clean water or food or clean air. Like a veteran who goes to pick up his backpack and finds he has no arms, I feel the impotence of school administrators who must fire teachers in schools already packed 50 students per classroom. And I feel teachers’ challenge as they try to prepare unresourced students to navigate the world. Gone are the debates over mandatory federal tests—there will be no federal standards at all. I hear the weeping of disabled grandfathers and grandmothers who lose their homes because they could not access the Social Security they invested in for 60, 70, 80 years. I taste the potato soup and Wonder Bread served to record-long lines of people trotted over by billionaires who cut their jobs to flex their power one Friday night in March 2025.
Our souls’ duty now is to stay alive. God will find us—in time to survive and eventually thrive.
How did we stay alive in the days of White Citizens Councils and Segregation? How did we stay alive in days of our nation’s great depression? How did we survive the days of mass lynchings once Reconstruction came crashing down? Here’s how. We pooled our personal dollars and built one room school houses that gave us the education we needed to send future freedom fighters to Howard, Spelman, Morehouse, and Harvard. We formed community cooperatives that made sure every neighbor had access to food. We lived three generations, per home. We did it to survive.
Something beautiful grew from that soil that felt like slop: We learned we were not alone. And this was not the first time we survived terror. The old-timers seeded their stories of resistance, subversion, and protest into young’uns souls. And in those moments of sacred exchange, they planted the wisdom that shaped a flourishing future.
In these shocking days, reach out. Now is the time. Survive—together.
President and founder of FreedomRoad.us, Lisa Sharon Harper is a writer, podcaster and public theologian. Lisa is author of critically acclaimed book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family And The World—And How To Repair It All.
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I feel numb. Thank you for the encouragement to survive. One day at a time.
Thank you for sending this. There is so much that's possible when we can survive.