This weekend, as we settled into our campsite, we found ourselves reflecting on a week of news that revealed much about who we are as a country and who we are becoming.

The death on Tuesday of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the relative lack of attention was on our minds. House Speaker Mike Johnson denied his family’s request to have him lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, despite his legacy of marching alongside Dr. King, negotiating the release of hostages, fighting apartheid, registering millions of voters, and championing economic and human rights around the world. What lingered in our minds wasn’t just the decision itself, but what it said in contrast to whom our government has chosen to honor. After the 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Trump ordered flags across the nation flown at half‑staff, a level of symbolic reverence not extended to Jackson. And last fall, Republicans held a vigil for Kirk in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, a space Jackson’s family was not granted.

The contrast was impossible to ignore. One man spent decades trying to broaden America’s moral imagination, calling the nation toward justice across racial and economic lines. The other built influence through cultural and ideological division. Yet in the rituals of public memory, our government elevated the divider while setting aside the unifier. It was hard not to see that contrast as a statement about whose contributions are deemed worthy of national reverence, and whose are treated as expendable.

Amid that reflection, the rest of the week’s headlines took on added weight. On Thursday, British authorities arrested Andrew Mountbatten‑Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, on suspicion of misconduct in public office amid renewed scrutiny of communications revealed in the Jeffrey Epstein files. He was questioned for 11 hours and released under investigation as police continued searches at his residences.

Yet, in another contrast, the Justice Department remained publicly silent, offering no new movement in a case that has ensnared so many powerful Americans.

And then came the Supreme Court’s sweeping decision on Trump’s tariff authority, a 6-3 ruling that didn’t just dismantle a signature economic policy, but firmly reasserted Congress’s constitutional control over trade and taxation. The justices held that the emergency‑powers law Trump relied on simply does not authorize global tariffs, a rare moment where conservative justices joined liberals to limit a president’s reach.

By Saturday night, snuggled against the evening chill around the campfire, we returned to the same thought: The balance of power–who holds it, who loses it, and who it ultimately serves–is never settled. Weeks like this make that truth unavoidable.

Out here, surrounded by people who love the land and the quiet and the space to think, that reality felt both heavier and somehow easier to hold. Maybe that’s what time outdoors gives us: a chance to sit with the hard stuff, sift through it, and talk honestly about the world we’re walking back into when we pack up and head home.