Everything’s on fire.

When we began planning our theme for this issue, we were watching the fires in California.

We knew the world was overheating. We knew there would continue to be drought and parched soil, red alerts and burned-out homes. We even thought we knew the spring would be hot, the rivers would flood, the electricity would go out. Although we feared a pandemic, we did not imagine one that would kill so many people so quickly, or one that would leave doctors no choice but to black tag the living in Italy and in New York City. We did not plan on burying the dead in trenches in the park because there weren’t enough refrigerated trucks for the decomposing bodies. We knew there would be ash, and black skies, but we did not imagine the food bank lines and the millions of people now unemployed. Some of us knew firsthand the deadly systemic inequities that people of color face in this country, but we never imagined that it would again result in a nationwide movement of mostly peaceful protest. We never imagined that - in our country - peaceful, legal protestors would again be tear gassed, or that priests would be ejected from their church to clear the way for a political photo-op foregrounded by a closed Christian Bible.  

Whatever world we had been living in when we imagined this issue, we certainly were not imagining the world we are now living in. We did not imagine that charred would mean the burning of bodies as well as trees, hopes as well as bushes. We did not imagine that life in the dark would be life inside a small apartment, that everything outdoors would need to be shuttered, or that the deaths would multiply. We did not imagine that a public health protocol to wear masks could be politicized or that working journalists who self-identified on TV would be arrested for their peaceful, legal coverage of protest. 

And so, as businesses and schools are opening back up without a vaccine, without a treatment, without enforceable wisdom — and as democratic protest is increasingly criminalized in the United States, and as people of color are legally murdered in plain sight, we bring this issue to birth. We thought we were environmentally charred, we thought we were living in the dark. But last year’s fires now seem like embers from a regional bonfire. Tonight we lie awake in fear of the flames that are coming. Tonight, and for the foreseeable future, we will all truly be living in the dark.

— FD, Director