When my children were young, I used to love spending their spring vacations in Florida. With a group of friends, we alternated, visiting Orlando one year, then Miami, and one time Sarasota. Leaving a cold, rainy New York in March, it was lovely landing in Florida and being greeted with warmer weather and colorful flowers everywhere.
I haven’t been back to Florida in a long, long time. Not because my children are grown and no longer want to spend time at Disney World. But because I don’t feel comfortable in a state where LGBTQ children are ostracized, draconian anti-abortion laws place women’s health in danger, and, as an author, books that I love and, at one time, read to my children, are now being banned from schools and libraries.
I feel the same way about Texas. Watching the All Star Baseball game the other night, I remembered exciting times I spent as an energy reporter in Washington, DC, covering conferences in the Lone Star State about oil and gas during the Arab Oil embargo in the 1970s. In 2021, when I went back to Texas for a film festival, one member of our group worried about wearing a “Black Lives Matter” pin. Would it touch off a confrontation? She took the pin off. Since then, of course, Texas has also passed restrictive anti-abortion laws and the women who have suffered and, in at least one case, nearly died, have told their horror stories on TV.
Ten years ago, we spent a family vacation in New Orleans, enjoying the music, food, and Mardi Gras museum. Now when I think about that beautiful city, I think about the children who are not Christian who will walk into classrooms where the Ten Commandments must be posted. The separation of church and state has become another victim of a movement to turn our country into one where white Christians rule, despite the fact that we are rapidly becoming a multi-cultural society.
Recently I interviewed a Catholic priest from Kenya who had spent two years at our church. He was going back to Iowa where he was before he came to New York. Iowa, famous for its caucuses which launch the primary season, is MAGA territory. How, I asked him, did he manage in the state. He told me that wherever he finds a community that wants to pray, he can find commonality.
I’m not a priest, but I do pray. Right now I’m logging long hours praying for our country, that somehow we can put aside our divisions and not be a country defined by red states and blue states. That we can embrace the country we are becoming rather than the country we have been. That we can condemn violence of all types, but especially violence directed at those whose beliefs conflict with our own.
These next few months will put all of us to a test of our humanity. And I’m told, by that priest, that humanity can be found everywhere, no matter the color of the state.
Top photo: Bigstock
