Ashes
The original title for this essay was going to be Rome (America) is Burning. It’s how I was feeling and how I continue to feel as the circumstances of this moment cascade around us daily. As I refined the piece, though, my spirit kept tugging at me to remember why I started writing. Which is not to be a ranter. An alarmist. Someone yelling from the treetops. Rather, it’s been my aim to share my vulnerabilities and share my heart in quiet, art-centered ways. A kind of calm flow that looks further ahead. So… here goes.
Years ago, in college, I began work on a project called Ashes: A Journey from Death to Life inspired by the classical music I was learning more and more about as a Music Performance major (one of many majors I had in university… I changed my mind a lot). The project took the frame of the Requiem Mass, pulling together compositions from different composers, shaping movement through the bodies of eight beautiful dancers and the presence of an older woman—a Judi Dench-type figure, a witness to the passage of time. It was meant to explore what comes after devastation, how we honor the dead while forging new ways of being. Fauré. Mozart. Verdi. Legiti. Vaughan Williams. Duruflé. I never finished it. But I’ve carried it with me for over 30 years. And now, as I look at the world around me, I wonder if it’s time to return.
I. Kyrie Eleison (Lord, Have Mercy)
Rome did not fall in a single day. It rotted from the inside first.
The Republic, once a grand experiment in democracy, crumbled under the weight of its own contradictions. Corrupt leaders clung to power, rewriting laws to serve their own ambitions. The Senate, once a deliberative body, became a theater of obedience, its members more concerned with their own survival than the survival of the Republic itself. Wealth concentrated at the top, squeezing the middle class into dust. The empire grew bloated, stretched too thin, devouring itself. Truth became slippery, a tool for manipulation rather than a foundation for governance. Mobs were fed spectacles—bloodsport in the Colosseum—to distract them from the slow collapse of the world outside. And then, when the center could no longer hold, the fire came.
And now, America.
The scaffolding of democracy is being dismantled in plain sight. Laws are not laws but weapons, bent to the will of those who wield them. The courts are compromised, packed with ideologues. Politicians no longer pretend to govern; they consolidate. They hoard. They incite. Violence is not an accident of our time. It is the point.
I know this because the people I love are receiving hate mail.
A dear friend—brilliant, fierce, committed to justice—now looks over their shoulder because they dared to believe in equity, in access, in a country that does not belong only to the powerful. For years, they worked tirelessly to build bridges, to bring people together, to widen the circle so that more could step inside. And for that, they are hunted. The emails, the warnings. The message is clear—not just for them, but for anyone who dares to stand in the way of the old order. Power does not relinquish itself willingly. It fights. It punishes. It terrorizes. And now, my friend checks the locks twice, looks over their shoulder in empty parking lots, wonders if they should step back, step away, disappear. But they won’t. Because even in the face of fear, they know: silence is complicity.
Another friend, the parent of a trans child, lives in quiet terror. Not because they are afraid of who their child is—quite the opposite. Their child is a beacon, full of light and energy, a testament to love unfettered by limitation. No, their fear is of the world that refuses to see that beauty, of a government that has declared war on their family. Laws are being drafted, debated, passed—erasing protections, criminalizing care, labeling loving parents as criminals. The state is coming for them. They watch the news with a clenched jaw, scan headlines for the latest battle in a war they never asked to fight. They weigh every decision with impossible gravity. They wonder what it will take to keep their child safe. What it will cost. What it already has.
II. Dies Irae (Day of Wrath)
And the state is coming for art.
Arts and culture institutions, once seen as untouchable, are now under siege. The right to create, to challenge, to provoke—all under threat. Theaters, museums, and cultural centers that have long been places of dissent, of reckoning, now find themselves in the crosshairs. And the absurdity of it all? The full weight of the state is being wielded not against corporate corruption, not against failing infrastructure, not against the systems that funnel billions into the hands of the few—but against drag queens. Against artists in wigs and sequins who dare to tell stories, to embody joy, to create spaces where the world is more expansive, more free. Legislators draft bills as if a man in heels reading a book to children is the gravest threat to the republic. Meanwhile, the real dangers—book bans, censorship, the slow erosion of public funding—tighten their grip. The Kennedy Center—the so-called national stage for the arts—has been reduced to a bargaining chip in political negotiations, its existence questioned, its very purpose under scrutiny. A country that turns its back on its artists is a country that has already begun erasing its own soul.
And the farmers.
My own family has worked the land in Iowa, generation after generation. Once, they were the backbone of a nation that claimed to care about feeding its people. Once, they received support, protection, investment. Now, they are pawns in a game played far above their heads. Trade wars, climate collapse, corporate consolidation—forces they never voted for, never had a say in—are swallowing them whole. Bank accounts lie fallow, not because the land is barren but because the system is. The very people who feed America are being starved by it.
What happens when the artists can no longer create? When the farmers can no longer grow? When the storytellers are silenced and the hands that cultivate the earth are forced to let it slip through their fingers? What happens when a nation no longer nourishes its body or its spirit? Tell me—what is the difference between an empire that feeds its citizens to lions and a nation that legislates them out of existence?
Rome burned because the people in power let it. They stood by as the institutions collapsed, as the mob was fed hatred instead of hope, as those who dared to resist were silenced or slaughtered. And now, I ask—what are we doing? Are we standing in the streets, refusing to look away? Or are we in the Senate chambers, rearranging the furniture as the walls cave in?
III – Libera Me (Deliver Me)
I have never believed in American exceptionalism. I have spent my life stepping beyond its borders, seeking voices beyond its echo chamber, opening pathways to other ways of being, of governing, of loving. And here’s the truth: we have so much to learn from those who have lived through what we are only now beginning to see. I am turning now to the Global Majority— the “Two-Thirds World” as my friend Mike van Graan taught me to say—not as an act of charity, but as an act of necessity. Because they know what it is to resist, to survive, to build something new in the ruins of what was meant to destroy them.
From Chile, I learn that memory is resistance. That history must be told and retold, not just in books but in the streets, on walls, in whispered conversations and bold declarations. That forgetting is how power wins.
From South Africa, I learn that truth-telling is a collective act. That after the horrors of apartheid, justice was not just about retribution, but about testimony. That naming what happened—who did what, who was complicit—is its own form of power.
From Palestine, I learn that occupation is not just about stolen land, but about the attempt to erase a people’s very existence. That to write, to dance, to continue loving in the face of erasure is its own revolution.
From the Philippines, I learn that democracy does not die in a single coup or election, but in the slow, creeping normalization of violence. That people laughed at Duterte before they feared him. That Marcos was exiled before his son became president. That history is not a straight line, but a wheel that turns unless we break it.
From Lebanon, I learn what it means to live with collapse. What it means to watch a country be looted by the powerful, its people left to survive without electricity, without medicine, without faith in the government. And yet—love persists. Art persists. People build something new even in the absence of the state. A friend in Beirut tells me: We have stopped waiting for the government to save us. We save each other.
From Egypt, I learn that revolutions do not happen overnight. That millions can rise, fill the streets, demand change—and still see the same faces return to power. That resistance is a long game, a generational one. That the fight does not end when a dictator falls, but when a people refuse to be ruled by fear.
From Uganda, I learn that queerness is resistance. That in a country where being LGBTQ+ is criminalized, where new laws are passed to erase and imprison and kill, love itself becomes an act of defiance. That underground networks exist, keeping people alive. That hope can be hidden in the most unlikely places—a borrowed book, a whispered name, a secret wedding in a quiet room.
From Hong Kong, I learn that protest is both an act of desperation and an act of faith. That people will show up, even when they know they will be beaten, even when they know they will lose. That the act of standing together is sometimes the only power we have left.
And from every Black American organizer I know, I learn that resistance is not theoretical—it is muscle memory. That this country has always been teetering on the edge of its own destruction, and yet, people have loved and built and fought anyway. That survival is not just about enduring, but about finding joy in the cracks of a broken system.
So I ask again: What are we doing? Are we centering the voices of those who have lived through this before? Are we listening to those who know what comes next? Or are we still clinging to the lie that America is different, that somehow we will be spared? Because history is clear: no empire lasts forever. But history is also clear on this—people survive. They resist. They find ways to love, to build, to create, even in the face of unimaginable violence. The question is not just whether we will act before the flames consume everything. The question is: what will we build in the aftermath?
IV. Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light)
But fire does not only destroy. It clears space. And in that space, something new is always growing. I look now to those who are not just resisting, but building.
Leigh Finke is legislating a future in St. Paul where trans people do more than survive—they thrive. Where dignity is not a question up for debate, but a given. She fights not just against erasure, but for a world in which trans joy, trans leadership, and trans futures are undeniable, protected, written into law. Kamilah Forbes is crafting stages at the Apollo and beyond that hold the fullness of Black stories, refusing to let culture be erased, distorted, or co-opted. She is curating the narratives that history tries to overlook, ensuring that art remains a force that does not just reflect society, but reshapes it. Kamal Bell is reclaiming the land, stewarding Black agricultural sovereignty, growing not just food, but a future. He is tending to the soil and the systems, proving that self-sufficiency is resistance, that feeding your people is a form of power no empire can fully control. Tiffany Warren is building cultures of belonging at SONY Music, ensuring that diversity is not just a metric but a movement. She is shaping an industry where inclusion is not performative but transformative—where power structures shift, where creativity flourishes, and where every voice has resonance.
These are not acts of repair. They are acts of creation. Because we are not returning to what was—we are forging what must be. Rome burned because those in power let it. But we are not only witnesses to collapse. We are builders of what comes after. The question is not whether we can save what was, but whether we will create what comes next.
V. Agnus Dei (Lamb of God—Grant Us Peace)
I grew up in Iowa, where time moves slowly, and the land teaches you how to listen. The soil is rich and dark, thick with history, with loss, with the quiet labor of those who came before. The people there know what it is to tend, to wait, to trust that what has been planted will rise when the season is right. You cannot rush the harvest, nor can you undo the storm when it comes.
That sense of patience, of deep time, has never left me. But neither has the urgency that comes with knowing what it is to lose something before you even realize it was slipping away.
In Cairo, I walked through the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival, where Ahmed Al Attar has built something defiant—a space where artists push against the edges of what is permissible, where the act of gathering is an act of resistance. In Beirut, the artists of Zoukak take their work to the streets, onto sidewalks, refusing the notion that art should wait for an invitation. In both places, creativity is not an accessory to culture; it is survival.
I think about these spaces as I think about my own country, a place that still clings to the illusion that it is immune to collapse. That we are somehow different. That the slow erosion of rights, the attacks on education, the criminalization of protest, the censorship of books, the defunding of artists—these are not signs of something deeper.
But the earth remembers. And so do I.
My daughter carries the blood of those who have always known how to listen to the land, who have lived through the breaking and remaking of worlds. She, with her White Earth Indigenous and mixed heritage, is growing up in a family that itself is an act of defiance—a rejection of the neat categories history tried to impose. And I want her to know: the world is not fixed. It never has been. It is made and remade by those willing to imagine beyond it.
To be an artist, a thinker, a citizen of this moment is to refuse the lie that what is must always be. It is to be a steward of what could be, a protector of what might still emerge. It is to recognize that even as the fire comes, we are not without choices.
The harvest is still ahead. And the seeds are ours to plant.
