.png)
By Kim and Mark Cavatorta
It’s the season for celebrating love and kinship, but really every season of the year we celebrate love of family, friends, and neighbors. That’s what makes us human. We’re social creatures who are cared for, taught, and inspired by people in our lives. And we care, teach, and inspire in return. We all need and are needed by each other, no matter our faith, color, gender, family members, country of origin, or how much money we have.
Knowing this, our hearts break for those in many communities across our nation who find themselves afraid, some so afraid they are in hiding. We can’t imagine how it must feel to go to a long-held job where we’ve been doing good and necessary work and be snatched up by masked, unidentified strongmen who detain us for who knows how long at a location unknown to our family. Just disappeared and maybe even imprisoned in a foreign land. How traumatized we would be, as would our family, not knowing what happened, where we were, and if we would ever be returned home. What if as children we came home from school and our parents were gone? How scared and lost we would be.
Is this who we are? Is this the America we love where we value the humanity of every person? We want our hard-working community members leading peaceful lives, whoever they are, to feel safe, to live a life free from fear and trauma. Isn’t everyone living here guaranteed fair treatment under the law?
At this time of year, we come together to celebrate the power of love, to celebrate light over darkness. We live in a country built on light and hope, not darkness and fear and cruelty. It’s not about politics; it’s about who we are as Americans.