This week I sat down to write a lighthearted column and was unable to focus on anything other than the recent tragedies that have hit alarmingly close to home. Between the massacre of Minnesota schoolchildren close in age to my own, the assassination of Charlie Kirk just miles from my childhood home, and the attack on Latter-day Saints in a meetinghouse that looks just like mine, it feels like the world is caving in on itself. Or maybe, more accurately, like we’re caving in on each other.
I feel as though I’ve been worn down to a raw wire, operating in a constant state of anxiety. When I drop my kids off at school, I think of those Minnesota parents and how they said goodbye to their children and told them they loved them the morning of Aug. 27, not knowing it would be the last time. I think about the hundreds of times I’ve visited the Utah Valley University campus, a place that has always felt bright and welcoming, and imagine the horror of being there the day a man was murdered in broad daylight. I examine the recent images of ward members huddled together, in their Sunday best, crying outside their burning building. One of them clutches a green hymnal, the same hymnal I sang from that same Sunday morning and that my children used to place papers on while they drew pictures to pass time during sacrament meeting. It’s difficult not to feel like the violence is creeping in on me. On all of us.
The internet does little to ease this anxiety. Despite knowing better, I find myself scrolling the X timeline and tapping through Instagram stories in search of a nonexistent explanation for why such violence exists, and how I can be assured it will never find my family. In doing so, I read literal calls for war. Demonization of entire groups of people. Debates over who deserves to live or die.
The more time I spend reading these algorithmically amplified reactions, the more I feel my pulse in my throat and the dark fog of nihilism roll through my brain. The discourse paints a bleak portrait of the future, one where neighbors war with neighbors and communities are torn apart by ideologies.
There is only one thing that really helps in those moments, when the terrors of the modern world feel unbearable, and it is, somewhat paradoxically, going out into that modern world. Because it is outside, in my community, where I find an abundance of love.
I witness that love in the crossing guard at my child’s school who wears a different themed hat every morning and every afternoon to entertain the children whom he helps safely cross the street. Yesterday morning, he wore a felt squirrel beanie, replete with big eyes and buck teeth. Yesterday afternoon it was an absurdly tall, striped top hat reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss character.
I see it in the construction workers who visited my daughter’s lemonade stand and overpaid by a factor of 10. And in the group of teen boys who ride their electric scooters along the same route I walk my dog, and every time we cross paths, they ask if they may pet and admire her. In the crowd of parents who cheer extra loud for the kid who needed the most swings to hit a ball off the tee during the first grade city rec baseball game.
Strangers are kind, neighbors even kinder, and from my vantage point, everyone is actively doing their best to make their community better. Even ideological disagreements never rise past the point of spirited debate. No one is calling for war. No one is demonizing one another. No one is wishing anyone else dead.
But, I realize, I am a white woman from a loving family who comfortably lives in the suburbs where most people look the way I do. And I belong to the predominant faith in the area. I am not so naive as to believe that everyone is met with so little friction navigating the world.
Prejudice runs rampant across the globe and is responsible for most, if not all, conflict. Many are antagonized and targeted for their race, their beliefs, and their place in the world. Few are blessed to walk out their front door into a privileged bubble of peace and prosperity, where stepping away from conflict is as simple as setting down the phone or closing the laptop.
So it is my most fervent prayer that the abundance of love I experience in my community can be extended to those whose journey through life is a steeper climb than my own. I pray that I am extending that love and that all of us who are so privileged are as well.
On the same day that Latter-day Saints joined the throngs of other faith communities who have become victims in this modern mass-shooting era, we learned that our prophet, President Russell M. Nelson, had passed away. After a near decade of leading the church, he will perhaps be best remembered for imploring Latter-day Saints to be peacemakers and bridge-builders.
Just weeks before his passing, in anticipation of his 101st birthday, he published a piece in Time magazine titled, “We All Deserve Dignity and Respect.” In it, he wrote, “Imagine how different our world could be if more of us were peacemakers — building bridges of understanding rather than walls of prejudice.”
“Each of us has inherent worth and dignity,” he wrote. “Recognizing the underlying truth … that we all deserve dignity is liberating — it brings emotional, mental, and spiritual equilibrium — and the more you embrace it, the more your anxiety and fear about the future will decrease.”
There is certainly no lack of anxiety and fear about the future in 2025. And many of those fears and anxieties, I believe, are just. I tell my children every morning just how much I love them in case it’s my last opportunity to do so. I worry about safety at public events and in my place of worship. And I mourn for those whose circumstances make them more far more vulnerable than mine make me. Every day, there’s a new headline that makes our collective safety and well-being feel uncertain.
I believe it is imperative that we work quickly to create policy that prevents our communities, our country and our world from being torn apart by violence any more than it already has been. But I also believe that we should simultaneously heed the wisdom of President Nelson and spend our lives recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of everyone while we build bridges of understanding rather than walls of prejudice to beat back the nihilism of division.
We could all use a decrease in the amount of anxiety we feel about the future, on and offline. And everyone deserves to step out their front door to a refuge of an outside world where an abundance of love is apparent. Because it is when we can witness the good, I believe, that we can overcome the bad.