I sometimes wonder what our country’s constellation would look like in the sky. Not the fifty stars on a flag, not the patriotic image we’re used to—but something living, celestial, woven from our collective selves. A constellation that shifts and flickers depending on how aligned we are with truth, or how far we’ve wandered from one another.
I imagine it now—dim in places, scattered in others. Holding shape only barely. And I can’t help but feel that what we’re seeing, or maybe refusing to see, is a kind of starvation. Not just symbolic. Not just emotional. But real.
We live in a country of excess, yet so many are hungry. Hungry for care. Hungry for fairness. Hungry for meaning. And though we fill our homes, our timelines, our plates—we still ache. There’s tension sewn into the very seams of this nation. Tension that tightens, that pulls, that finally tears.
I remember talking politics with my grandparents when I was little. It was the '80s and '90s. I’d bring up something simple—like why they voted against school budget increases—and the air would shift. Pressed lips. Crossed arms. A kind of stern silence that said: “You don’t understand.” And maybe I didn’t.
My dad was a teacher. To me, education was sacred. But to them—children of immigrants who scraped and saved and built something from nothing—there was fear in letting go of what little they had. Maybe even resentment. I can see it now in hindsight: the gap between city and rural wasn’t just geography. It was a fracture in trust. A sense of being left behind, even while others were reaching ahead.
That divide… it’s been with us a long time.
I think about New Orleans. The flood. The way the water didn’t just drown—it revealed. It showed the country something it didn’t want to see: the poverty, the fragility, the abandonment. For a moment, the veil lifted. And then, like always, we re-covered it with noise and narratives and “moving forward.”
But the fabric had already begun tearing long before that. Katrina just made it harder to pretend.
And now… it’s hard not to notice how tired the threads are. You can hear it in the way people talk—if they talk at all. The eyes that look through, not at. The tension in places that once held a simple trust. I saw Obama almost in tears recently, and it pierced me. Because you could see the weight of trying to lead a people who don’t agree on what’s broken—let alone how to fix it.
We’ve prided ourselves on independence for so long, but we’ve starved our sense of connection in the process. Freedom isn’t just choosing your own path—it’s knowing you’re not walking it alone. But for so many Americans, life feels like a solitary struggle. And that isolation becomes resentment. Then that resentment becomes policy. Or apathy. Or worse.
We have the power to feed the world, and yet we’re malnourished. Not for lack of food—but for lack of communion. We don’t sit at the table together anymore. We argue over who’s stealing the seat, or who deserves the meal.
I don’t know where this path leads. But I do know it won’t be easy. You can’t stitch a new fabric until you’ve mourned the old one. You can’t tell a new story until you admit the last one left people out.
Maybe we can’t go back. Maybe the old constellation doesn’t serve us anymore. But constellations are just stories we see in stars. That means we can reimagine them. We can find new connections. Draw new shapes. Build something that includes the dim spaces and the bright ones.
I still believe in the sky. I believe in people. I believe that hunger, as painful as it is, can be a teacher. And I believe there’s still time to learn.
But we have to look up. And we have to see each other—not just the stories we tell.