We’ve Been Here Before

There are moments when the world feels heavier than the body was designed to carry. When the news scrolls faster than your heart can keep up. When you look at your phone and realize you are watching fear try to pass itself off as authority.

Last night felt like one of those moments.

Not because of a single speech or a single city or a single headline. But because something underneath it all became visible. A familiar shape. An old strategy. Fear as leverage. Control as reassurance. Power insisting that compliance is safety.

And yet, outside the frame, people were standing in the streets.

Not reckless. Not unaware. Not confused.

Unafraid.

There was something quietly historical about that. And about the words that followed. Not focused on federal abstractions or policy jargon. Not reduced to talking points about drugs or immigration or crime. But naming the thing beneath the thing. Fear. Control. And the quiet, stubborn strength of community as its counterweight.

When moments like this arrive, I don’t argue. I don’t scroll harder. I don’t look for the perfect words to win a conversation that isn’t really happening.

I look for music.

Because music has been here before.

Long before any of us were born, people felt this same tightening in their chest. They felt it in church pews and on porches and in kitchens and on long walks home. They felt it when laws were passed that made their lives smaller. When uniforms appeared in places they didn’t belong. When the future felt conditional.

And they sang.

Not because singing fixed things. But because it reminded them who they were while things were breaking.

Sam Cooke sang from the crossing. A sacred voice stepping into public risk. He didn’t shout. He didn’t threaten. He stood exposed and said what he saw. A change is gonna come. Not because it was guaranteed. But because hope spoken out loud becomes a form of resistance. Saying it costs something. That was the point.

Marvin Gaye sang like a diagnostician. Naming the sickness softly so people would listen. He didn’t accuse. He asked. What’s going on. He understood that truth only works if people can stay in the room long enough to hear it. That gentleness can be radical when the world is bracing for impact.

Curtis Mayfield sang like an organizer. Faith turned into movement. His songs didn’t just comfort. They instructed. People get ready. Keep on pushing. Hope with posture. Belief with legs.

And then there were the others. The ones who stayed when the adrenaline faded. Donny Hathaway. Bill Withers. Voices that held the line after the marches. After the speeches. After the headlines moved on. They sang about leaning on each other. About someday being free. About love not as sentiment, but as infrastructure.

That is where I find myself now.

Not at the crossing. That happened years ago.
Not diagnosing. The patterns are clear.
Not organizing in the streets this moment.

Holding.

Holding memory. Holding perspective. Holding the truth that fear wants us to forget. That this country, this world, has been here before. And it didn’t make it through because fear won. It made it through because people remembered each other.

Music helps with that.

It regulates the nervous system when language fails. It reminds us that despair is not new and neither is resilience. That we are not the first generation to feel disoriented. And we will not be the last. But we are part of a long line of people who refused to let fear be the loudest voice in the room.

When I hear songs written decades ago speaking directly into this moment, it tells me something important. Not that history repeats cleanly. But that human courage does.

People standing together in the streets are not a breakdown of order. They are a reminder of it. Community is not the opposite of law. It is the reason law exists in the first place.

And when leaders speak to that. When they trust people instead of managing them. When they name fear instead of amplifying it. Something steadies. Something old wakes up.

We have been here before.

And we made it through.
Not perfectly. Not without scars.
But better.

Music didn’t save us.
But it stayed with us long enough for us to save each other.

That is still true.

And when the world feels heavy again, I will keep doing what people have always done. I will listen backward to remember how to move forward.