Maybe: God Always Has a Punchline

Apr 27, 2025

There’s an old Buddhist story I’ve been clinging to lately, like a seatbelt in a car that’s fishtailing toward a cliff.

It goes like this:

A farmer’s horse runs away.

The neighbors gasp, “Oh no, what bad luck!”

The farmer shrugs. “Maybe.”

The next day, the horse returns — dragging three wild horses behind it.

“Wow, what good luck!” cry the neighbors.

Farmer shrugs again. “Maybe.”

Then his son breaks his leg trying to tame one of the wild horses.

“Oh no, terrible luck!”

Farmer: "Maybe."

Later, an army shows up to draft every able-bodied young man for war — but they skip the farmer’s son because of his broken leg.

Good luck? Bad luck?

You can’t always tell when you’re in it.

You just have to stay alive long enough to find out.

That story?

It’s been the background music of my whole life.

Like the time in ninth grade when I transferred to a new school where I knew nobody, talked my way into honors English, and immediately had a teacher decide — based solely on my last name — that I didn’t belong there.

She ripped my work apart, humiliated me daily, and eventually threw me out of class for being "too stupid" because I turned in a short story about sunlight instead of a five-paragraph essay on "The Importance of Rules."

At 14, it felt like the End of Everything.

Fast forward twenty years: I’m standing at the podium at my hometown bookstore — NYT bestselling author, first novel optioned by Columbia Pictures — doing a signing with a line out the door.

Guess who shows up to cover the event for a tiny local paper?

Her.

Same teacher.

Didn’t recognize me.

I smiled so wide it could’ve powered the damn sun.

When you stand on the side of justice, God always has a punchline.

You just have to stay alive long enough to hear it.

Or take the time I left the LA Times.

I wrote a resignation letter calling out how the media depicted Latinos — flattening us into stereotypes, erasing our real stories. I said I was leaving journalism for fiction to tell nuanced truths about us that the paper didn't allow.

The letter was meant to be private.

Instead, it got leaked and published.

Suddenly, I wasn’t just a journalist — I was "arrogant," "ungrateful," "radioactive."

I thought my career was dead.

I got dragged onto a panel at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists to publicly atone for my sins. I walked in fully expecting boos and side-eyes.

What nobody in that room knew yet — but I was able to tell them — was that while I was sitting there, my agent was juggling a bidding war for my first novel.

By the next morning, that "arrogant" little girl who dared to want more for her community had a $475,000 book deal. Those reporters all scurried back to their newsrooms across the nation, to write my Phoenix-Rising story.

That novel? Hit the bestseller lists, because everyone who’d come for a public flogging of “the woman who burned bridges” ended up treated instead to the best literary press conference, ever.

It changed my life.

The thing that felt like a funeral turned out to be the opening scene of my resurrection.

And now here we are again.

Right now, it feels like our country is falling apart.

The Trump movement isn’t even pretending anymore:

– Mass deportation plans.
- Extrajudicial imprisonment of legal US residents in torture camps in El Salvador
– Racist and Politicized targeting of Latino citizens, migrants, college students, judges, and journalists.
– Vicious attacks on education, free speech, voting rights, science, food safety, privacy, public health, the oceans, the air, the water, the land, books.
– Open admiration for authoritarian rule.

The people who study fascism for a living are waving red flags so hard they’re practically taking flight.

And it feels bad.

It feels worse than bad.

It feels apocalyptic, like something precious is dying right in front of us.

Maybe it is.

But then — I remember the farmer.

I remember that history doesn’t just end when the bad guys show up.

After Hitler, Germany became one of the strongest democracies in the world. They taught the next generations how to recognize hate — and stop it.

After Franco’s dictatorship, Spain became a place where freedom and music and messy, beautiful democracy could bloom again.

After apartheid, South Africa built one of the most progressive constitutions in human history.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe woke up singing.

After Jim Crow, Black Americans remade the moral conscience of a nation.

The darkness doesn’t have the last word. It never has.

There is always another side, and there will be another side of this, too — and together, we will make it there.

So if you are tired, and broken, and scared, and furious: Good. That means you’re still here.

Hang on.

Hang on even if your grip is slipping.

Hang on even when everything feels rigged and ruined.

Hang on even if your heart feels like it's dragging behind you in the dirt.

Because the punchline is coming.

It always does.

History belongs to the stubborn, the stubbornly hopeful, the stubbornly alive.

Maybe today we’re broken.

But tomorrow? Friends, tomorrow we rise.