Witness from a Terrace

By Rev. Steve Edington

This essay was first published as an Op-Ed in the July 28, 2025, New Hampshire Union Leader.

The French novelist, essayist, diplomat, and playwright Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944) made this observation: “One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.”  I’m not sure to whom Monsieur Giraudoux was referring as “the great,” but his words have been much on my mind lately.

Whatever Giraudoux meant by it, I do not consider myself as among “the great.” But I am aware, in ways that increasingly disturb me, that I am witnessing the current American MAGA catastrophe from a terrace.

From my terrace I witness ICE Agents seize persons off our streets on the merest suspicion of their citizenship status: It’s round them up now and, maybe, deal with their due process rights—which they have whether citizens or not—should we get around to it. I witness some of these detainees being shipped to what is for all intents and purposes a hastily constructed concentration camp in Florida’s Everglades, cynically and cruelly called “Alligator Alcatraz.”

I witness from my terrace I saw how a just recently ICE Agents descended on a youth baseball team practice on a New York City playground to ask teenagers, who were born in America, about their parents, who are of African, Mexican, or South American descent. The team’s coach was able to get the Agents to leave and ended the practice session. When he later rescheduled it, only two players showed up.

I witness from my terrace the threats to the health care, via Medicaid, to millions of Americans; and the impending closing of rural hospitals that currently serve them.

I witness a 60 billion dollar cut from the USAID budget that will result in deaths in The Congo, Ethiopia, Senegal, Sudan, and several other countries.

I witness a President who has little regard for our Constitutionally mandated democratic processes, and who is being enabled in his flouting of the rule of law by a compliant and subservient Congress and Supreme Court. I witness him surrounding himself with incompetent sycophants for a Cabinet whose members bend to his every will and whim.

I am protected from the immediate effects of these, and many other, catastrophes I witness. But they still have an effect on me when it comes to my coming to terms with what it means to live as a protected American at this point in our country’s history. I know I’m not alone in this regard.

I am closing in on my 80^th birthday. Whether I live to see it or not, I have to believe that a day of reckoning will come in this country, if and when the MAGA fever breaks. There will be the question of “How did we ever let this happen?” The equally pertinent questions for those of us who had a terrace from which to witness it all will be: What did I do in the midst of that fever, and when did I come down from my terrace?

I’m gratified that there are places to go for those of us on our terraces. I’m heartened by the turnouts I saw at the two No King’s rallies I attended last month. I felt honored to gather in the name of the late US Representative John Lewis to “Make Some Good Trouble” earlier this month. I’m pleased that there is a nationwide organization with hundreds of local chapters called Indivisible with which I can involve myself.

By themselves these events and involvements may seem puny in the face of all we witness. But I take heart from these words from the late Pete Seeger:

“If there’s a world here in a hundred years, it’s going to be saved by tens of millions of little things. The powers-that-be can break up any big thing they want. They can corrupt it or co-op it from the inside, or they can attack it from the outside. But what are they going to do about 10 million little things? They break up two of them, and three more like them will spring up.”

I offer these words from Pete to those of us who have the luxury of our terraces. However small our get-off-our-terraces activities may seem, we must act as if they are among those “tens of millions of little things” that Pete envisioned—because they are.

Pair Mr. Seeger’s words with these of Mahatma Ghandi: “Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it’s important that you do it anyway.” This was one of the rallying cries that eventually brought down British rule in India!

One more quote to end on—this from the song “Woyaya”—as attributed to several sources:

“It will be hard we know, and the road will be muddy and rough, but we’ll get there, heaven knows how we will get there, but we know we will.”

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Rev. Steve Edington is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, New Hampshire.