Red letter days
Writing hope at the edge of night. Tiny actions matter more than ever.
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I wrote this last year in my red writer’s notebook. It is more true now than ever. I didn’t share it here because it felt dramatic. But it clearly is not. This is the reality that wonder is rooted in.
July 02, 2025
Courage is contagious. It’s easier to be brave when we can be brave together.
A pen, a Moleskine, something to lean on… that’s all you really need to start a movement.
Red. It’s the color of fire.
Of warning. Of rage. Of rose petals.
Of oxygenated blood.
Of rebellion. Of being marked.
Of love. Of control.
Of pigments. Scarlet. Vermilion. Cadmium red light. Venetian red. Indian red. Crimson.
We are six months into what feels like a sprint through the stages of genocide.
No, that’s not hyperbolic. Unravelings don’t happen all at once.
Stage seven, Preparation. Check. Victims ID’d. Other-ed. Separated. Camps being built. Deportations, and detentions begin.
Stage 8. We’re here now. Persecution. Forced movement. Masked men disappearing people in broad daylight.
Civil liberties, eroded. Raids normalized. Fear rampant.
The America I once knew is gone. But to be fair, the America I thought I knew was only ever true for some of us.
Red, the color of a tide that suffocates life. The color of regimes. Not sorry, I refuse to think of it as an administration when its acts are predicated on gleeful cruelty.
Red, the color of the notebook I’m writing in.
I write these words, and it feels like the opening scene for a dystopian YA series, but it’s not. It’s playing out every day around me.
I was raised on The Sound of Music. Twice a year, every year. I practically had it memorized. At 10, I used to imagine where I would hide if being hunted by an evil world government. It’s harder to hide now.
We are being plunged into a surveillance state that would give George Orwell nightmares.
I fear our screens have lulled many to sleep. As long as it is just on a screen, it is happening to someone else.
Do I write any of this publicly? It has risks that weren’t here 7 months ago. But holding an untold story is sometimes worse than the repercussions of telling it.
Silence feels like living erasure, and enough history is already being rewritten in real time. Gaslit. Denied, even though there are hours of video footage saying otherwise.
Worse, silence feels like being complicit.
I have lived in war zones overseas. I just never expected what I saw there to happen in my backyard.
I was more naive then. And by then, I mean 2 months ago.
Unfortunately, the cruelty happening now isn’t a glitch in the system. Or a flaw in the matrix, it is its very scaffolding.
People are disappearing. Communities gone, families ripped apart. While my FYP is overflowing with influencers selling the viral Halara shorts. They have pockets. Like it’s a normal Wednesday.
Like, they didn’t just open up American Auschwitz and call it Alligator Alcatraz in the Everglades just in time for hurricane season.
Red, it’s the color of a thousand tiny cuts that bleed away our humanity. It’s the color of the lights and stop signs we are careening past.
Red the color of lipstick and resistance.
But I’m not giving up hope.
Millions already see the travesties and are saying, “Not on my watch.”
I don’t know what the path ahead holds, but I did not put my life on the line for years in South Sudan to be silent here.
Red, it’s the color of Sudanese clay, soil soaked in 40 years of bloodshed. At least that’s what I was told when I arrived with my 6 bottles of water, backpack and a camp stove.
But even in the midst of such suffering, the incredible resilience of the people I got to know reminds me every damn day we can tell ourselves a better story.
Red. The color of the tip painted on bamboo stakes that marked unexploded landmines and ordinances. Around water sources and boreholes. Under mango trees where people would sit in the shade. Along roads where people walked.
Cruelty isn’t anything new. But I never want to stop being shocked by it.
Red, the color of wine, of grapes that are crushed, of communion. Take, eat. Come drink. Go serve.
Red, the letters of words spoken by a Middle Eastern refugee who escaped an assassination attempt as an infant by a genocidal tyrant.
Jesus said:
Those claiming the name of Christ on Sunday, purchasing Alligator Alcatraz merch on Monday, jeering on the mass deportations on Tuesday do not serve the Jesus of the Bible. They serve a whitewashed, political caricature twisted by the love of power, made in their own image.
There is hope, even at the edge of night. That said, we cannot afford to stay silent and wait to be rescued.
Red is the color of sunrises and autumn maples, of cardinals, zinnias, and watermelon juice on a hot summer afternoon.
A red letter day is a day of importance. I’d like to believe these words will be important for those who one day might read them.
We don’t have to sit back and watch history unfold on our screens. We can each do what we can with what we have to be a part of shaping it.
Tiny actions done with great love have never been more critical. Love always wins.
A Cup of Courage is where I share my thoughts and stories from the intersection of current events and how wonder helps us find our way home in a distracted, divided, disconnected world.
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“Cruelty isn’t anything new. But I never want to stop being shocked by it.” Right here with you, Michele. Thank you.
“The America I once knew is gone. But to be fair, the America I thought I knew was only ever true for some of us.” This. So humbling and so true. All of “this” is not new for many.