In the past couple of weeks I’ve had multiple friends on social media share their belief that violent protests are never appropriate. I’ve done my best to listen and engage, but I’m not entirely convinced. I can think of multiple scenarios where my friends would either condone a violent uprising, or at least understand what’s driving the violence. The first two scenarious that come to mind are the lawless protests that lead to the American revolution, or a poor guy destroying an ancient Jewish market place armed with a scratch-made flogging device.

What I hear my friends saying isn’t “violent protests are always wrong,” what’s underneath their sentiment is the idea that whatever the Black community is protesting, it doesn’t merit physical violence, arson, destruction of property, etc. Anything other than peaceful assembly is lawless behavior, in this particular instance.

As a white Christian who suffers from PTSD, I prefer that these demonstrations be as peaceful as possible. Like everyone else, I’m struck by the power of Dr. King’s methods and the mountain of change that was brought to America at the hands of the most marginalized people group of that day. I grieve when I read news and watch video footage of stores being looted, fires, beatings, and how this kind of violence affects the bigger message that so many more from the Black community are trying to get us to hear.

To my Facebook friends who are disappointed in my failure to condemn the violence on my feed, let me explain why I haven’t, and why it grieves me to find no mention of George Floyd’s death, only a condemnation of the violence, on yours.

Generational Trauma

Using 1700 as a “beginning” point for slavery in the US, and the Emancipation Proclamation as its end, we have 150 years or so of extreme physical and emotional abuse of an entire people group. “PTSD” doesn’t begin to describe what Blacks from that era brought into the 1900’s.

And beyond.

For the past 10 years or so, the psychiatric world and the genetics community have been talking about the relationship between trauma and epigenetics, i.e., the idea that trauma can be passed down to multiple generations. We know that’s true on a purely psychological level – traumatized adults are more likely to struggle with abusive behavior, creating traumatized children who’ll grow up to be traumatized adults, etc., etc. But the epigenetics evidence argues that the problem can be inherited regardless of the emotional/physical relationship between parent and child. It’s a relatively young field of study, and it’s not without its critics, but when I consider the generational trauma evident in my own family, I don’t have a hard time embracing what a growing number of researchers are inviting us to consider.

“Our review found an accumulating amount of evidence of an enduring effect of trauma exposure to be passed to offspring transgenerationally via the epigenetic inheritance mechanism of DNA methylation alterations and has the capacity to change the expression of genes and the metabolome.”

In so many ways, abuse travels much farther than the abused, so when an entire generation is systematically mistreated, as in our chattel slavery years, that pain can and does travel well into today.

Rest assured that whites were traumatized as well. The only way a human can reconcile itself to the horrors of slavery is to downgrade its victims. In our attempts to cope, we forced ourselves into the belief that there was something wrong with these people, that they were less than human and somehow benefited from this arrangement. If we struggled with racism before slavery, we wove it deep into our fabric in these 100 years.

That trauma, I’m convinced, is also alive today.

After a couple of failed attempts at “post slavery” restoration and reconciliation (think “10 Acres and a Mule”), we transitioned into a chapter of American life commonly referred to as Jim Crow. Many argue that this era wasn’t much better than slavery, filled with intimidation, lynchings, unjust legislation aimed at keeping as many blacks behind bars as possible, etc.. You can’t expect much from white lawmakers spawned from a generation of people who rationalized the horrors of slavery.

So, to the generational trauma from America’s first 100 years, add the pain that was piled on afterwards.

By the time we get to the Civil Rights era, Blacks in America were dealing with a mountain of unresolved pain, something whites could never relate to. In light of that, the peacful protests of Dr. King and his friends were beyond heroic.

Unfortunately, in the 10 years that transpired between Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act and the legislation passed by President Johnson, we added to the trauma bill more abuse, imprisonment, lynchings, intimidation, dogs, fire hoses, segregation, etc.

In the years between Dr. King’s assasination and today, we added more.

Systemic Racism

Liberals in America love talking about systemic racism; the idea that there are economic, cultural, and political systems rigged in favor of whites at the expense of non-whites. Some have compared this problem to Jim Crow, claiming that America hasn’t travelled far beyond the arrangement that few in America would call a good thing.

If you lean towards the conservative side of this argument, dismissing it as a mindless, liberal, anti-America sentiment, I think it’s appropriate to at least be aware of the following facts, and to be able to articulate them to the point of defense, though you might not land on my planet.

First, black unemployment is twice that of white unemployment. With few exceptions, it’s been that way since the dawn of unemployment statistic tracking. Regardless of the fact that blacks in America are more educated, resourced, empowered and motivated than ever before, they’re still twice as unemployable as whites, still the first to be fired in an economic downturn, the last to be hired when things are good.

That’s a system.

Second, again, regardless of the mountain of changes we’ve made since the Civil Rights Movement, blacks earn 2x less than whites and again, it’s been that way for a long time.

What these systems communicate is that, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you work, there’s a cieling, a limit to your potential that will always be 2x lower than whites.

Third, according to the past twenty years of arrest and incarceration statistics provided by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, we’ve imprisoned blacks at a rate approximating 5x more than whites for the same crimes.  I wrote about it here if you want to look a bit deeper, and/or, do an online search for “mass incarceration,” and read both sides of the argument. There’s much to consider.

This is a systemic thing too, but, in addition to the often negative effects of incarceration, this one ensures that a significant number of the Black community will be labeled “felon” when they’re relased, living with restrictions on voting, housing, and unemployment that remind too many scholars, activists and Sunday morning bloggers of Jim Crow.

Unfortunately, the only people who’ll see this are a) the people on the business end of it and/or b) people willing to risk the time and emotional pain required to check the data.

You don’t have to call it “systemic racism” if you don’t want to. I know how it sounds like a political agenda, and rest assured that there are politicians who’ll try to weaponize it for their own personal gain. But it’s a thing, and one of the reasons why our black brothers and sisters are begging us to listen.

Add to all of this the problem of generational trauma, then throw in George Floyd and all the other pictures and footage we now have, and you get a level of injustice that nobody should tolerate, especially the people who have the power to change it. But the change that’s needed isn’t going to happen anytime soon. We might find a way to bring a relatively meagre level of law enforcement reform, but the other mountains won’t be easily moved.

So to the trauma, the systems, and the day-to-day micro/macro agressions that so frequently attend black America, add a significant level of distrust, and for many, a thin hope at best.

When I see fires, broken windows, folks resisting arrest, etc., I see pain, generations of it. I see unfair treatment and inequitable systems symptomatic of deep sociological problems that will require painful effort and sacrifice from whites in America. The way forward lies nowhere in the arena of judgment and condemnation, but in compassion, self examination, humility, and a conversation about racism in America that requires an unprecedented openness to black authority.

As a white, southern born-and-bred Evangelical, myself and others like me will have some difficulty with that last sentence. The act of giving a black person authority, in any arena, won’t come easy. There’s a part of our soul that wants the easy way out, to spin these cries for injustice into something that’s easier to dismiss, and much less costly for us.

But when my racist inclinations collide with the truths discussed above, as well as multiple face-to-face conversations and encounters with people on the business end of all of this, I realize that I’m one of the victims too – a sucker who swallowed the wrong story, now trying my best to swim against the powerful current of racism at the personal level.

In all of this, I’m much less inclined these days to pass judgment on people who are dealing with pain and systematic realities that I could never relate to.

I sat on the porch with Elaine last night and listened to the sirens, the flash bombs, an occasional gunshot, and watched the helicopters circling downtown. I had spent the day reading perspectives on these protests from many of my fellow white Christians strongly implying, once again, that blacks in America aren’t responding appropriately. While I feel the need to add my thoughts here, I’m not sure where to begin, so I contacted a couple of friends and asked if I could share their reflections on the mess we continue to find ourselves in.

The first comes from a fraternity brother, Tim, who leans a bit conservative for my taste, but he’s thoughtful and a regular go-to for my attempts at grasping how the other side thinks. And he’s super funny. He posted this on May 28, 2020:

“I know exactly zero people have been waiting to see what I have to say about the death of George Floyd, but I gotta get some stuff off my chest…read if you want, skip it if you want…we are good either way. Just some thoughts:

You’d never see Bernie Madoff or Martin Shkrelli in handcuffs being choked to death by a cop’s knee, but George Floyd pays for a bad check with his life. Hell, I can’t imagine a scenario where my 51 year old white neck is under that knee for a similar crime. There is a wealth privilege and white privilege in this country you have to be willfully blind to not see. It is illustrated in the extreme in situations like this, but it manifests in a thousand other ways – big and small.

I thought systemic racism and white privilege were overblown for years. I had some people of color who loved me enough to tell me to shut up and listen, and I got to hear their stories. I urge you to do the same if you are fighting the instinct to tell me how wrong I am. I worry about my 18-year old son all the time, because he’s in that magical, ridiculous age when kids think they are immortal…but I never worry about him being the victim of violence by the police or anyone else because of his skin color…even when he’s in a hoodie.

It is a peripheral note, but if you want to say racism is overblown, or you feel the need to rationalize, do a little research into the modern-day slavery of our prison system as well as the ridiculously skewed sentencing patterns between blacks and any other race. It has gotten better under the current administration (yes, I am shocked too), but it is absurd.

I see lots of my FB friends with posts condemning the rioting and looting. I’m not going to directly defend that, but I will say I get the rage. And if things would ever actually change, maybe the instinct to burn it all to the ground wouldn’t be so strong. I also don’t think those posts are very helpful…but that’s just me.

 …I had one friend say something to the effect of “this stuff almost never happens. Every time it does, it gets plastered all over the news.” I would make two points regarding that:

1. I don’t remember the last time an unarmed white person was killed by the police or a vigilante…probably happened, but can’t remember. But the names of George Floyd and Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and others come to mind easily. (And I have zero interest in rehashing those cases).

2. We generally only get the ones caught on film splashed all over the news. An average of 2 unarmed black people are killed every week by police. That can’t happen.

And no – I don’t think most people are racist. But it’s time for all of us – especially white people – to be actively, passionately anti-racist. Look for it, root it out – in your own life first and then in every corner you see it in.

If you made it this far, thanks. And as always, my opinions may be completely wrong…however, if you are about to argue with me, might I suggest talking it through with a black friend first.”

Tim calls for two things we avoid like the plague. First, not many of us will sit down with a black protester, face to face, and listen to what they have to say about this current crisis, and all of the crises that have led up to it. That would involve the painful process of questioning our grasp on reality, making the world feel like it’s about to fall apart. At best, we’ll go to our favorite media outlet – the one that a) tells us what we want to hear and b) is populated almost entirely by white people – and let them tell us why blacks in America are upset.

Second, while there are some of us who might broach the issue of systemic racism in the US, we don’t talk about racism at the personal level. “Rooting out racism in our own lives” simply isn’t going to happen.

One of the realities we need to “wake up” to is that we are (still) living predominately segregated lives. Our friends are white. Our kids’ schools are white. Our churches are white. Again, with few exceptions, the media folk who tell us how to think about race are white. Few of us interact on a personal level with non whites and therefore have no occasion or opportunity for our racism to show itself. Ergo, we’re not racist, right? Somehow we’ve come to believe that, if we’re racist, we’d feel it. Sin seldom works that way.

To my Christian brothers and sisters I’ll expound a bit on Tim’s advice to root out racism in ourselves. Don’t ask yourself, “am I racist?” Instead, ask God to audit your dark internal spaces and bring to light whatever might be lurking underneath, especially with regards to attitudes and beliefs about people who don’t look like you do. I did. In my experience, the “show me where I’m broken” prayer is one that God always answers. As someone raised in the south I can tell you that it’s still a painful process.

Either way, if we’re going to continue to give our personal sin a hall pass, refusing to ask hard questions of ourselves, racial healing for our country doesn’t have much of a chance, and systemic racism will continue to find the fuel it needs to motor forward.

The second thought comes from a friend, Jim, who founded what I’d call the best spiritual formation curriculum on the planet. The gist of Faithwalking is to empower and equip Jesus followers to be “fully human,” “fully alive,” and “fully missional,” stepping freely into the world’s broken places to do what Jesus does best. He posted this on May 29.

“My friend…[a former police officer]… asked me in another post what evidence I had that Derek Chauvin, the police officer in Minneapolis who killed George Floyd, was a racist. I am grateful to you for your service to our community during all those years that you served. And, I want to say again here, that I believe that the vast majority of police officers in our country are hard-working, honest, courageous community servants.

I really appreciate you asking the question because it gives me an opportunity to keep attempting to communicate clearly.

I do not believe that I have said that this officer is racist. If that is what you heard, I did not communicate clearly. I don’t believe I said that because I don’t have any way of knowing whether he is a racist or not.

What I have said repeatedly is that I believe the justice system itself is racist.

To me one evidence of racism in the system is that he was not immediately arrested. On a daily basis offenders are arrested and held when there is probable cause. I believe that if a black man had pinned a white man down with his knee and held him there until he died, he would’ve been arrested on the spot – based on the immediately available evidence. This white man was allowed to go free for several days before finally being charged today.

And, if this was an isolated incident, I might interpret it differently. It is not fathomable to me that if two black man had stopped a white jogger in a Georgia neighborhood at gunpoint, shot and killed him, that they would not have been arrested or perhaps shot and killed on site. Or if a white kid wearing a hoodie was walking through the neighborhood and a black man had shot him that he would have been immediately arrested, tried and convicted. And the list goes on. In virtually every nationally publicized case when black people are killed by white people, it is clear to me the black people are treated differently – unfairly – in some profound ways by the justice system.

I believe the system itself is broken. It works for you if you’re white and even better if you’re middle class or rich. But over and over people of color are treated in ways the middle class and rich white people would never be treated. People of color have been saying that to us for generations. White people have just unable to hear or unwilling to listen.

I think a part of what is changing the conversation is not that there is more racism today, but that racism is being filmed and the stories are being broadly told.

The system is made up of police officers, district attorneys, judges, offenders, and defense attorneys as key players in the system. One of the things that is true about systems is that sometimes a system will do something that no one in the system believes is right. All the way back to the early 1920s, Reinhold Niehbuhr, in his book Moral Man Immoral Society, gave expression to that idea.

I believe there is clear anecdotal and statistical evidence that our justice system is unfair to people of color. And as I white man I’m working to change that. Not by calling individuals racist, but by working to change what I believe to be a racists system.”

The mounting evidence of a system rigged in favor of white America is problematic for people who aren’t intersted in looking deeper, indicting the “All Lives Matter” approach to racial injustice. Again, considering data that doesn’t jive with our political ontology is painful, so, again, it’s something we’re not going to do.

And because so many of us will refuse to ask “might I be wrong?” we condemn ourselves to more division, more protests, and the secured future of racism in our country.

Instead of thinking “here we go again,” we should see these demonstrations as an invitation to step into humanity’s most broken places, as Jesus commanded, to expend our energy and resources on behalf of people who are running thin on hope.

I know that some of my friends will feel compelled to point out what I’ve missed, the flaws in my thinking, etc. I’ve invited you into a process that I’ve engaged for the last few years and can testify that it’s changed many things. Like Tim, I spent the majority of my adult, southern Evangelical life thinking as you do. I’ve lived on both sides of this coin, and have heard every argument for the idea that goes something akin to “yeah, there’s racism here, but it’s not that bad.”

None are compelling enough for me to return to a way of thinking that runs counter to the righteousness of God and the wholeness that He’s called us to pursue.

These protests serve as an invitation into a level of peace that America has not yet known. Imagine what would happen if we accepted. Until then, demonstrations like the ones protesting the death of George Floyd are going to be as much of white American life as baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Jesus.

 

art by Sonia Sadler from Seeds of Change

I wake up most mornings, ideally before everyone else, to hit the couch in our office and try to come up with something to blog about. Our youngest gets up 15 minutes after I do, snuggles up close, grabs my phone and shops on Amazon while I write.

She holds her face five inches from the screen, eyes wide open like young Harry Potter in The Sorcerer’s Stone when he first glared into his family’s vault. In her mind this is real – a pair of Elsa boots will change everything.

Part of me wants to shut it down. Kids should engage with more meaningful things; stuff that might bring a bit more life into their life, but the look on her face is precious to me. She’s not looking at cheap plastic junk, she’s dreaming, big. There’s nothing sweeter than a child who’s gotten hope all over her face. The older I get, the less likely I am to try and clean it off.

But we want to protect our kids from the constant, nagging disappointment of this place, to prepare them for an adult world that doesn’t suffer a child’s hope, one that too frequently mops the floor with fools who can’t keep their dreams tethered to “reality.”

So, being the good Christian parent, I give her a lecture about saving money and finding comfort in Jesus, then turn around and put a few hundred dollars worth of Jeep accessories in my cart.

We all want stuff.

Sadly, shopping doesn’t satisfy our desires, it wakes them up. The more we have, the more havoc we unleash. The same goes for all the other “stuff” we’re hoping to acquire: comfort, pleasure, fame, significance, influence – the more we manage to unearth, the deeper we’ll dig, ’til our nails bleed.

At some point we’re forced to accept the depressing reality that our desires are too big for this place – no amount of getting will suppress the wanting. We are desire, pure and simple.

Wisdom says, “That’s just how it is – we have to find a way to be thankful for the things we have and move on.” Unfortunately, that always devolves into what the psychotherapeutical world calls repression: “the process and effect of keeping particular thoughts and wishes out of the conscious mind in order to defend or protect it.” In our pursuit of thankfulness we ignore one of the most fundamental parts of being human, and we pay for it. The quickest way to a half-lived life, one potentially fraught with mental illness, is to “grow up,” believing that our desires aren’t real, or that they’re stupid, unspiritual, irresponsible.

Dangerous.

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” ~ Sigmund Freud

So, especially in church circles, we tiptoe quietly around our beshackled fancy and talk instead about mission, bible, finances, politics, good relationships, what God wants from us, “right” theology, the moral life, self control…

… how to become more like Jesus.

But you can’t become more like Jesus without becoming more like yourself, and you can’t do that apart from honest, regular encounters with desire – not the desire for more stuff, or a better job, a greener lawn, etc., but the underlying desire that drives it all.

The Elsa boots in our hearts have nothing to do with footwear, and everything to do with what they represent. Wanting a bigger house is almost completely unrelated to more space, a better neighborhood, etc. Nobody changes their locale and forever stops wanting to change their locale. Our hopes are leashed to a much deeper want for comfort, adventure, beauty, significance, and a few other core desires that a new home, or anything else on this planet, can never fulfill.

It’s impossible to want the stuff of fame, for example, without an underlying desire to feel good about onesself, like I matter so much that millions of people saw my Sunday morning post and shared it with their friends. God may not have given me the desire for a huge fan club, but I’m certain that He gave me the desire for weight, significance, dast we say “glory.” Whatever desire might spin off of that is my creation, usually a corrupted version of what lies beneath.

Same thing goes for my favorite sins; lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, pride, etc. None of those happen without desire. Sin doesn’t have some brand of faithlessness or unspirituality at it’s core, that idea doesn’t go deep enough. Sure, we’re forced to ignore the rules of a good life when we choose to do wrong, but that’s simply the “permission” step of sinning. What drives it all are the impossible wants that are swirling around in our soul every hour of every day.

Our pastors and teachers tell us that we’ll sin less if we “desire God” above all things – a good Christian only has a single want. But that doesn’t go deep enough, either. I believe, as Origen did, that we all live with a desire for God, but that’s far from our only want.

As such, we’re forced to ask where these core desires come from. Who authored them? Again, I’m not referring to all of the corrupted, Elsa-boot versions of our deeper desires; the impressive paycheck, the stunning physique, etc. I’m referring to the bedrock stuff underneath.

Humanity, all of it/us, has this in common: the stuff we’re digging for has the exact same desires at its core: significance, beauty, intimacy, comfort, pleasure, justice, adventure, joy, laughter, discovery – all as universal to us as hands and feet. There is no culture in human history that doesn’t have your core desires running nearly the entire show.

We might express (and contaminate) these in different ways, but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see that we all want the same thing(s).

How? It can’t be evolution, there’s no evidence from archaeology/anthropology that might lead us to believe that human desire has evolved into what it is today. There’s nothing that keeps me from assuming that things common to all of us have always been here, and might just be part of a bigger design.

As such, I’m comfortable lobbing the proposition that our core desires came straight from God; they are authored by him, intended to be as much a part of our life in the here and now as all the other things we confess to be “eternal.” If we’re created “in the image of God,” bearing within our soul and maybe on our face some representation of His values, abilities, agendas, and, for this discussion, desires, we’re forced to consider the idea that our core desires are His, and will echo into eternity.

Blueprints

Because of the pain that desire causes, and because our culture of faith paints desire as an unsavory proposition of sorts, I’m tempted to repress, to act like it doesn’t exist. Understandably, whenever I think of what the afterlife might look like, I imagine something that nobody could look forward to, failing to understand that looking forward to heaven is mission-critical for anyone hoping to follow Jesus into the broken places of our world.

But to many of us modern Christians, it’s all a bit of a joke. We’d never admit that, but our thoughts about heaven aren’t compelling enough to affect our day-to-day life. If our current predicament is such an affront to our deepest desires, doesn’t it stand to reason that our view of heaven will be an eternal extension of the same? We don’t want to be let down, and we certainly don’t want to commit the sin of selfishness, so we play the safe, benign, boring card and picture a great cathedral where we sit in a pew and sing.

Forever.

Worse, instead of dreaming about a future crafted by the God who loves unconditionally, and who can do whatever It wants – including but not limited to the unbridling of significance, beauty, intimacy, comfort, pleasure, justice, adventure, yada, yada – we limit our dreams to the here and now, and all of the cheap plastic nonsense within.

Boring. That’s not what lives within us.

If I exegete everything that God has authored, especially bible, humanity, and cosmos, I’m forced to conclude that human desire is here to stay. It’s just as permanent as we are, and it comes compliments of our creator. So is it theologically sound to at least give our desires some authority as we consider the content and character of whatever’s coming next?

Are our core desires the blueprints of heaven?

Will there be beach vacations and awesome sex and mansions resting on a cliff overlooing the wine dark sea and parties where everyone screams our name when we walk in the door? Maybe – who can say what an overthrown deity, the one who made us want, will put under the tree?

Regardless, we have to assume that our core, impossible-to-live-with desires will finally have a place to roam freely. No fences. We’ll no longer experience joy’s end, or wonder if beauty will come out for an encore. We’ll forever be the child who can’t catch her breath at the first sight of all the presents on Christmas morning, or the soldier reunited with his loved ones after years of wondering if he’d ever make it home. Significance, intimacy, adventure, beauty, joy, laughter, excitement, anticipation, etc. will rule the day in a place tailor fit for our deepest desires, no longer a car that dies moments after we try to start it.

Through a Dim, Dirty Glass

St. Paul likened our current predicament to an unborn baby, safe and cozy inside its own reality, experiencing the hints and muffled sounds of ours, with no concept for what’s about to happen. He talked about the suffering and pain that humanity will experience as it’s spat out into the next thing, and how all the hosts of heaven are waiting in anticipation for our birth.

In this analogy, we are the baby, while, oddly, we have been charged with the care of the baby. Love, forgiveness, mercy, compassion, justice, truth, etc., all have significant effect, as do hatred, envy, injustice, marginalization, lies, violence, etc. As such, we can’t claim to love and care for God while ignoring the care of His most valuable possession. So it should surprise none of us that the majority of Jesus’ commandments call us into things that will make this pregnancy go much more smoothly:

• • “Turn the other cheek”
  • “Do not judge”
  • “Keep your word”
  • “Do not fear”
  • “Love your enemies”
  • “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
  • “Honor your mother and father.”
  • “Forgive others as you would hope to be forgiven by God.”
  • “Serve others.”
  • “When you throw a party, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind.”
  • “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
  • “Go to the ends of the earth and teach people to do all the things I’ve taught you to do.”
  • “If you love me, keep my commandments.”

In all of this I hear, “Take care of the baby.”

Rest assured that ours is a temporary arrangement; whatever’s next will be a fuller, brighter, heavier, much more intimate station. For now, we’ll have to be content with the hints and muffled sounds of heaven while we care deeply for each other, comforted and encouraged by hope in what the most powerful entity imaginable will do with the desires He’s placed within all of us.

For now, dream, big; so big that it affects your life. If it doesn’t, you’re not dreaming big enough. Maybe spend a little time thinking about the core desires underneath your preferred heaven, coming to grips with the part of you that’s been chained up for so long, adjusting your picture as you go. But whatever you do, dream.

Rest assured, whatever you come up with will be a poor representation of what will be, like a child hoping for a cheap plastic tiara under the tree who finds a pony in the backyard instead. There’s no way any of us can imagine what we’ll be spat into, but if our desires are any clue, it’ll be amazing, and more human than we dare imagine.