For this week’s post, I intended to return to the topic of Beauty as one of the three Transcendentals. But events of the past week have bumped me off that course.

I needn’t tell you what occupies the front page of the newspapers here in Dallas. Nor need I tell anyone from my generation how difficult it is to watch the present crisis in race relations in America.

As a child of the 1950s raised in the South, I witnessed the world of our fathers turn upside down. Many historical evils in the fabric of my country were rooted out, sometimes by inches, sometimes by miles. So many unsung heroes sacrificed so much. And things did change. The cloth was knitted back with a newer, stronger weave that stretched with promise into the future.

I was proud of the Civil Rights Movement—proud to have been alive to see it (albeit still in elementary and junior high school). It made perfect sense to me that a generation able to defeat fascism could come home and right drastic wrongs on its own soil.

Thus I find the present lurch back into racial chaos doubly disturbing. What does it mean when a half century of progress over something so patently wrong suddenly seems to be crumbling before your eyes?

Or is it? I’m starting to see a tiny ray of light. I’m reading things that are heartening. Have you seen some of them too? Shetamia Taylor gave a deeply moving TV interview that is going viral. She is the woman at the very heart of the massacre who was protected by three Dallas police officers while she covered her son after she herself was shot. If you haven’t watched this interview, I suggest you do.

Far less dramatic, but hugely important, are the individual posts and videos trickling out from people not present during Thursday’s tragedy. Americans are responding from their kitchens, living rooms, and backyards by putting up testimonies to racial unity. One such video that especially touched me involved a biracial couple with five children. The father was silently holding up sheets of paper on which were written strong answers to his opening question: “Who are we?” The children, ranging in ages from about 7 to 15, silently moved into the screen at strategic points. I found myself imagining the discussion this family had as they decided: “Let’s do something to help—whatever we can.”

I don’t know where any of this is going in terms of our American future, but for the sake of the lives lost, it needs to go somewhere. I remember the pioneers of racial justice whom we in my childhood watched on TV. I think of the generations before them who never had modern media as a forum for proclaiming their message, but affected deep changes anyway.

I think of my own in-laws whom I knew only in the latter years of their lives. My husband’s father, a Presbyterian minister, and his mother, a bold Christian educator, both stood strong in the struggle for racial equity. They did it in ways similar to what we see in famous photos from the 1960s. But they did it even earlier, in quieter ways, such as flinging open their white suburban church to black guest pastors. This may sound like nothing to today’s kids, but it put both my husband’s family and the the guest preacher in jeopardy.

So many people did so much to shake up complacency back then. Maybe that’s what is happening now, again. Complacency has not only been shaken up. Complacency is no longer possible.

It’s time for people to heal these problems. We as a nation, no matter what anyone says, have come closer to solving mankind’s thorniest problem of racial division than any country on the planet. I personally saw in my lifetime such changes that might take other nations centuries to achieve—if at all.

America remains a beacon to the world. Traveling extensively in my work, I see and hear more than I can absorb. It comes down to this: the world still looks to America for solutions. I want to be able to speak of my beloved country and say, “Yes, we have problems, of course, and some are quite severe. But we are grappling with them. We are moving forward. We are dedicated to the solutions.”

We may disagree on how to achieve those solutions and I’m sure we will. But our common desire to find solutions has to be bigger than our disagreements. So maybe today’s post is about Beauty after all, because one of the truest expressions of Beauty is our common humanity. And Beauty abounds in the instinct of a mother to protect her child and the selflessness of an officer to protect that mother.

Let us protect and nurture the precious but fragile progress made before us by an army of people no longer here to witness or to guide us with their wisdom. They are counting on us to continue towards the goals they fought for. We must not disappoint them.