It was just another message, the spewed vitriol of a single troll hiding behind the veil of anonymous indifference offered by our (dis)connected world.

“Stop talking about shit you don’t understand,” the message said simply. “Stay in your fucking lane.”

The message was in response to some of the more politically-oriented posts I’ve made recently. I shouldn’t have let it bother me. But it did, and I did.

Those words bounced through my head this morning as I ran through the hills, following freshly-iced, winding singletrack through gloriously silent forests.

Maybe I should stay quiet, I wondered. Maybe I should just stay in my lane, just keep writing about mountains and pictures and Everest and such.

The yellow caught my eye as I waddled past: “National Forest land behind this sign.”

I’d passed this sign and others like it hundreds - maybe thousands - of times before with little notice, but this time it stood out. For the past seven miles, my path through the woods crisscrossed an intricate patchwork of lands, open spaces owned by Clear Creek, Jefferson, and Denver Counties; the US Forest Service; by all of us, open to all of us, enjoyed right now, unfettered and unbothered, by me.

I grew up hiking - and later rock and ice climbing - in New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest. I’ve spent decades climbing and then guiding on Mount Rainier and Denali; endless days scraping up classic trad routes in the South Platte and teaching ice climbing in the Uncomphagre; running and hiking thousands of miles across dozens of states, marveling at the simple grandeur and impossible beauty of the natural world: These lands built me, helped define my passions and pursuits, began the melding of who I am.

But it’s more than that, more than just the land and recreation. That simple USFS sign sparked a deeper thought process in my meditative, pensive running mind: I am lucky. Damn lucky. Lucky to have these lands, to have the time and capability to enjoy them, spend time in them, let them influence and educate and challenge me.

And the luck - my luck - doesn’t end with open spaces. Far from it. My luck percolates outward to so many other things that have enabled me to live the life I’ve lived and be the (vastly imperfect) person I am.

• I was lucky to be born middle-class, white, and male in America.
• I was lucky to grow up under the rule of law and the Constitution, and to have decades of imperfect leaders who respected those pillars and abided by them.
• I was fortunate to have a US passport that allowed me to travel far and wide to places where Americans, if not always agreed with, were generally respected for the well-intentioned (if imperfect) goodwill we’d built for years.
• I was fortunate to have family that exposed me to people of different skin colors and views and religions and languages and nationalities, and encouraged seeing them not as a threat but as a gift, a bounty, a beauty of our world.
• I was blessed to grow up in an America that tried to look forward not back, to move toward our collective dreams and visions instead of reverting to old times, passions, and perversions.
• I was blessed to know I was the distant relative of immigrants, some desperate migrants from Ireland and some arguably illegal immigrants from Scotland.
• I was lucky to have family who served courageously, valiantly, in multiple conflicts over multiple centuries to fight for our ideals, our ethics, our stability, our national integrity, and who paid, willingly, hefty prices in injury and sacrifice.
• I was, in short, lucky for so much in my life, so much that I did nothing to earn aside from simply being born.

As the miles wore on, a narrow path carved through conifers, I reveled in and reflected upon my good fortune. Relative wealth and health, security and safety, an ability to do things I love and largely enjoy the life I lead. I don’t feel guilty about my luck, my good fortune - I had no say in most of it. But, I do feel responsibility, a deep and abiding responsibility to act, to speak, to use whatever meager platform I have to throw my voice and my person into the fray, to fight for the legacy and future of the country I love and the ideals on which is was born (but has yet to fully realize), to insist my good fortune be made available to all on our soil, and that the trails I ran today will be around for thousands more tomorrows.

So, no, I will not stay in my lane. I will speak and write, protest and petition, and do all I can to resist the bastardization of our nation, our laws, our Constitution, our ingrained ethics and morals and basic humanity, our world. I’ve been given far too much to imagine anything different.

I may have the right to remain silent (for now at least), but I feel I have the duty to speak.

“For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day.”
— Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts

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Finally, some Thursday Thought quotes to inspire us all to keep speaking up, speaking out, rising up for what is right:

“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (on Archive.org)

“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”
— Haile Selassie

“Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.”
— Thurgood Marshall

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.”
— Robert F Kennedy

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
— Elie Wiesel

“What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.”
– Gaton Bachelard

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
— Alice Walker

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”
— Thomas Jefferson