Amid the snow and long nights, there is a quiet insistence on remembering, on telling the stories that matter. And yet, not far away, the news tells of lives ended, of authority deployed without accountability, of neighbors afraid to act. I am also the child of parents who were active in the civil rights movement – a multiracial family that taught me early: freedom is never given. Celebrations of liberty mean little if they erase the struggles that made it possible or ignore freedoms still denied today. They remind us that the revolution – the effort to define freedom as something real and universal – is not over.