Lately, it feels like our country is carrying a weight that keeps getting heavier. The tragedy in Minneapolis — two people gone, two families left with questions no one should ever have to ask — has been sitting with me. Not because of politics, not because of the noise that always follows, but because these were human beings. And somewhere along the way, we’ve forgotten how to see one another that way.
In the middle of all this, I came across Maya Angelou’s poem On the Pulse of Morning. I wasn’t looking for it. It just found me — and it stopped me in my tracks. I’d heard pieces of it before, but reading it now, in this moment, it felt like she was speaking straight into the world we’re living in. She originally wrote and read it for President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration on January 20, 1993.
There’s a line that hit me harder than I expected:
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
When I read that, Minneapolis came to mind immediately.
Angelou wasn’t naïve. She knew what division looked like. She lived through times when people were separated by law, by fear, by the stories they told themselves about who deserved dignity and who didn’t. And yet, she never stopped believing that people could choose something better. She believed that cruelty was learned — and that anything learned can be unlearned.
That’s what keeps echoing for me.
We don’t have to agree on everything. We don’t have to vote the same way, think the same way, or see the world through the same lens. But we do have to remember that disagreement doesn’t give us permission to dehumanize each other. It doesn’t give us permission to stop listening. It doesn’t give us permission to forget that every life has worth.
Angelou had this way of calling people higher without shaming them. She didn’t pretend the world was fine. She didn’t sugarcoat injustice. But she also didn’t let bitterness take root. She believed in accountability and compassion — not one or the other, but both.
If she were here today, watching what happened in Minneapolis, I think she would grieve deeply. But she would also challenge us. She would ask whether we’re choosing courage or convenience. Whether our words are building bridges or burning them. Whether we’re willing to rise — not because it’s easy, but because the alternative is a world where tragedies like this become normal.
And that’s the part of On the Pulse of Morning that keeps coming back to me. The poem is full of invitations — to begin again, to listen, to step out of old patterns. It ends with a simple, powerful image: standing on the earth and saying, “Good morning.”
A new start. A new choice. A new chance to be better than we were yesterday.
Maybe that’s what we need right now. Not another argument. Not another attempt to change someone’s mind. Just a return to responsibility — to each other, to the truth that we are “more alike… than we are unalike,” and to the belief that we can disagree without losing our humanity.
Minneapolis deserves that. Our country deserves that. And Maya Angelou would still be calling us toward it.
The Quiet Middle 