The Fire Within: A Letter to My Unraveling America

The photograph burns in my memory like a brand—old white men assembled around power, their faces carved from marble indifference, their eyes looking through me as if I were vapor. These are the architects of my supposed well-being, the guardians of my alleged freedom. I whispered to the silence of my room, "Oh hell nah," and felt the weight of every ancestor who ever dared to dream of something better.

I am a grown man, black and gay, with Latino blood coursing through veins that have carried too much history, too much hope, too much heartbreak. I am tired of being patient with a world that asks me to shrink, to choose, to apologize for the fullness of who I am. The Democratic Party couldn't hold me—too weak, too willing to genuflect before the altar of compromise. The Republicans? Never. I am politically homeless in a nation that was never built to shelter souls like mine.

Today I cried. Not the gentle tears of melancholy, but the raw, guttural sobs that come from watching your country's soul being auctioned to the highest bidder. I had just finished Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, and his words struck me like lightning: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." We have not faced ourselves, America. We have not faced the mirror that reflects our capacity for both transcendence and terror.

This beautiful piece of heartbreak legislation signed into law ignited fear in my belly—not the fear of a coward, but the fear of someone who has seen this dance before, who recognizes the choreography of cruelty dressed up as righteousness. I breathe and remember: God has not given me a spirit of fear, but of power, and love, and a sound mind. I am not religious in the traditional sense—I am something between Christian and Buddhist, a seeker in the wilderness of American spirituality—but I know sacred when I feel it, and I know desecration when I witness it.

Something in the paradigm must shift. I cannot write about flowers and sunsets while my brothers and sisters are being legislated into invisibility. I cannot speak of love without naming the hate that seeks to devour it. My ancestors—those who fought and cried and prayed and loved their way through slavery, through Jim Crow, through the countless resurrections of white supremacy—they did not endure for us to retreat into silence.

And some of you voted for this man. Again. Let me not get angry—no, let me get angry. Let me rage with the fire of every prophet who ever dared to speak truth to power. If Baldwin were alive, would he write us another letter? Would he remind us that "the most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose"? Would he tell us that we are that man, that woman, that they, that we are the ones with nothing left to lose but our chains?

I fight back with my art because art heals, because art remembers, because art refuses to let lies stand unchallenged. Sometimes I feel like I am shouting into the void—this beautiful writing reaches only three souls, when I dream of leaving a footprint felt by the world. I want to be rich like Rosie O'Donnell and flee to the Mediterranean, to sit by waters that have witnessed the rise and fall of empires, to create in peace while my soul finds rest.

But that is not the answer, is it? The fight rages in my spirit still. Love and truth, always searching, always becoming. I carry within me the blood of the oppressed and the oppressor—mulatto written in bold on ancestor documents, marking the moment when love and violence became indistinguishable, when survival required a complicity that still haunts my high yellow flesh. Were they raped by master? Did master convince himself it was love? How did this story begin, and did some of my lineage vote for their own diminishment?

I know black folks who voted for someone who despises them for a tax credit, for some distorted reasoning that makes sense only in the fever dream of American capitalism. Democrats, I cannot return to you until you find your spine, until you stop genuflecting before the altar of bipartisanship while they burn down the temple. Where is Malcolm? Where is Medgar? Where is Martin in 2025?

I am tired. Even writing this makes me weep from the depths of my soul—not tears of defeat, but tears of recognition, of finally naming what has been gnawing at my spirit. I must get my own act together and stand strong. Continue to fight for what I know is right, even when righteousness feels like a luxury I cannot afford.

They say love always wins. I hope they are right. I hope love is more than a hashtag, more than a bumper sticker, more than a campaign slogan. I hope love is what Baldwin meant when he wrote, "Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."

In the meantime, I leave you with the fire within me—the fire that burns away illusion, the fire that forges steel from flesh, the fire that refuses to be extinguished by the winds of hatred. I hope you find yours. I hope you tend it. I hope you let it burn until it lights the way to a world where no one has to choose between their authenticity and their safety, where no one has to whisper "Oh hell nah" to photographs of their own government.

The fire is still burning. The fire is still burning. The fire is still burning.

Find yours.