When have you felt time stop—the hands of a clock suspended like a bird caught in midair unable to continue its flight?

I encountered a stopped clock at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta this past November. After a visit to the King Center, I stepped into the empty church and noticed a palpable presence. Echoes of songs, prayers, hopes, and grief hung in the air like a cloud of incense.

Perched on a balcony above the back pews, a motionless clock was fixed at 10:30—the time of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral in that very sanctuary 56 years ago.

Tragedy stops time. I was left with an image of a bird trying to escape the confines of the frozen moment, which I animated here:

The clock mesmerized me—not a memorial to assassination but to the moment Dr. King’s community gathered to lovingly remember him. The clock felt like a portal back to that historic funeral. I imagined the pews filled with intergenerational mourners—elders who had laid the foundations for Dr. King’s faith and younger people, including his children, who now had to carry on the work without him. The community would forever carry the memory of the funeral and the pain of the loss. Time did not literally stop, though. It continued and so did they.

The clock poses many interesting questions about the nature of trauma, our experience of time, and community remembrance. I realized these questions are the same driving my own art and film work: how can we acknowledge and memorialize tragic moments while we simultaneously move toward a more hopeful and just future? How can intergenerational partnership help us along this path?

I have been thinking about this long-term, intergenerational work and how it relates to the needs of our young people. As Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has warned, we have multiple epidemics affecting our world. Pandemics of isolation and loneliness have created a youth mental health crisis. Our children greatly need the support and mentorship of older adults. In turn, isolated elders need the energy and fresh perspective of youth.

I experienced the power of cross-generational connection with InterGeneration, my film connecting Boston teens and elders through storytelling and animation. Inspired by oral history’s influence on my own life and art, I created a curriculum for a Boston after school teen arts program. I combined oral history with animation, allowing for a deeper exploration of the stories. The animation would also give the teens an artistic resource for life.

Unbeknownst to me, the project start date of April 2020 would be at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown. The project continued through the police brutality racial uprisings and culminated with the disputed 2020 election. It was a turbulent and scary time. Yet for us in the film, the social interaction, aided by Zoom, was an antidote to the surrounding fear and isolation. Within a framework of playful creativity, we shared our stories and deeply listened to each other.

My purpose for being in Atlanta, which motivated my visit to the King Center and Ebenezer Baptist Church, was an international educational conference hosted by CASEL (the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.) The SEL Exchange conference title was Leaders as Learners: Building the Village Our Children Need.  The theme focused on the social and emotional needs of adults as well as children. I presented a workshop and screening of InterGeneration with my friend and educational advisor, Trelane Clark. We provided tools which could help participants develop similar intergenerational projects in their own school communities.

With so many educators in one place, a picture emerged at the CASEL conference of the challenges facing our nation’s schools. Teachers and school leaders are burned out, overwhelmed by the multiple traumas affecting school communities—COVID, entrenched racial inequities, the opioid crisis, gun violence in schools and communities, and most tragically teen suicide. Too many clocks have stopped at traumatic moments for children throughout our country. The needs of this young generation are too great for our educators to carry alone. Schools need a network of broader public support. We all need to be involved in the well-being and education of our children.

The good news is that there are many allies addressing these challenges. CASEL is an important example. Through years of research, they created an adaptable set of principles that help schools and organizations incorporate social and emotional learning (SEL) into their programming. CASEL’s framework helps students and adults strengthen their self and social awareness, their self-management, their relationship skills, and their responsible decision making. The framework helps students see themselves as responsible individuals within a larger society, increasing empathy across difference. The goal is a school community within which every student and teacher has a sense of belonging and can collectively say, “We are all in this together!”

Creative partnership between different age groups fosters this sense of interconnectedness. As mentioned earlier, InterGeneration gave us a sense of belonging to community during a time of crisis. The elders saw it as an opportunity to be open and helpful, and they were inspired by the outcome. The opportunity to share their stories gave the adults a sense of the empowerment and value of their life experiences. Their memories brought history alive for the teens, giving the youth an understanding of what the past “felt like.” In response, the teens saw themselves as part of the continuation of intergenerational work, picking up where the elders left off and moving forward.

Intergenerational relationships locate us in time as we simultaneously consider an elder’s past and a youth’s future. Similarly, the stopped clock at Ebenezer Baptist Church reminds us that we cannot act without the knowledge of past tragedies. We need to face history in all its complexity, because there is harm done in the present by single-mindedly glorifying the past. Yet the clock also warns against allowing trauma to immobilize and distract us. The clock calls us to purposefully move forward for our children and our elders. The work of democracy, for example, cannot be completed by any one generation. It is a perennial endeavor requiring the efforts of all of us.

An educational partner in this important work is Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO) who screened InterGeneration last year for their teachers. This organization uses lessons of history to challenge bigotry, examining the roots of the Holocaust, racism, and other human rights injustices while promoting understanding. The work is difficult, yet it is also inspiring and illuminating. For every example of tragedy and injustice in the past, FHAO can also cite examples of courage and hope. The same is true for each of us in our own personal lives and history.

Facing History and Ourselves also uses the CASEL constructs of self and social awareness. They screened InterGeneration, because it is a case study of elders helping youth understand their own identities in relation to the identities of others. Exploring our ancestry is a key piece of self-awareness and an important element in the film. For instance, an elder film participant shared stories of the importance of food and cooking in preserving tradition. This inspired a teen participant to animate the memory of his grandmother making Soup Joumou, the stew to celebrate Haitian Independence Day. The animation is a beautiful, positive moment of Haitian culture that counters the dominant news cycle narratives of the country.

InterGeneration gave me an opportunity to engage with my own Lebanese ancestry. In September 2023, the Lebanese Independent Film Festival screened the film in Beirut. Though I could not attend, the occasion brought back memories of the Lebanese elders in my life who have since passed—my grandparents, aunts, and uncles who greatly influenced me. I particularly remembered my grandmother’s Orthodox church and the welcoming community of Lebanese and Palestinian immigrants. They passed on the food and culture to me, sharing stories of a homeland they dearly missed.

The screening in Lebanon was a gift to me—a moment of cross-cultural connection and exchange. However, my joy turned to sorrow on October 7th. The current horror in the region repeats a violent cycle that in 2006 devastated Marjayoun, my family’s ancestral village on Lebanon’s southern border with Israel.

InterGeneration will have a national release on PBS member stations in September this year. The timing is not lost on me—we are facing the same candidates and election rhetoric in 2024 as we did in 2020, the year we produced the film. This time, the stakes are higher as fascism threatens global stability and that of our own country. Fascism is not a new idea, but a repeated intolerance of the humanity and rights of others. It is the same mindset that stopped the clock in Ebenezer Baptist Church and dominates in the absence of other types of thinking. People too often willingly forget history. We must counter the effects of conscious amnesia by cultivating oral history and developing intergenerational relationships.

An important elder and friend who vitalizes for me the context and meaning of the stopped clock is Ruby Sales, an African American theologian and founder of SpiritHouse Project. A few weeks after the CASEL conference, Ruby invited me to an intergenerational event in Washington D.C. She gathered people from across the country—"elders and younger backpackers,” she called us. We discussed our deep national divides, including fascism, that threaten our democracy.

Ruby knows first-hand the dangers of fascism. She participated in the Southern Freedom Movement of the 60s and 70s (known more broadly as the Civil Rights Movement.) It was a decidedly nonviolent effort. Nonetheless, at 16-years-old, Ruby was almost a casualty of the same oppositional conflict that killed Dr. King. Time stopped for Ruby during a demonstration in Lowndes County, Alabama. Her friend, Jonathan Daniels, a seminarian from New England, was murdered by a vigilante. Jonathan placed his body in the path of a bullet that was intended for Ruby. She often says that in this moment, she simultaneously saw the worst and the best of white America.

Ruby is a living witness to injustices that continue to stain our country. Despite all, she says, “We are not entrapped in bad history.” Her confidence comes from the redemptive power of love and faith instilled in her as a child. Her community gave her soul force, she calls it. They taught her that her life mattered, that her actions mattered, and that she could make a difference. Jonathan Daniels had a similar experience. Called by faith, he left seminary to join the Southern Freedom Movement. A black family risked their lives by taking Jonathan in to live with them. Their example and the soul force of the community empowered Jonathan to commit a courageous act of self-sacrifice for his friend.

One of the devastating effects of our pandemics of loneliness and isolation is that we lose track of our interconnectedness. We begin to think that we are alone, that we do not have value as individuals, and that our actions do not matter. Instead of vibrant, diverse communities that bolster us with love, we find ourselves in echo chambers that amplify our worries and fears of “the other.” We dehumanize those who are not like us. This is an especially dangerous situation for our youth. Instead of being inspired to a life of service, as was Jonathan Daniels, we might find them astray; on the path of the hate filled vigilante who pointed his gun at the unarmed 16-year-old Ruby.

How do we help our youth as we head into this shifting and uncertain time? Moreover, how can we, as Americans, move from siloed isolation to vibrant social connectedness? How can we create a cultural awareness of “being in this together,” holding onto faith in American democracy during a tumultuous time in our country and world?

I return to the stopped clock at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Each mourner in the pew that day had every reason to give up on American democracy. Yet they didn’t. They knew that the hope of democracy is not held in one person, but in the powerful love of multicultural, intergenerational community.

The past year brought the needs of our country into sharp focus for me. InterGeneration is expected to reach a large audience on PBS this year, modeling to the nation the power of empathetic and creative civic dialog across generations and cultures. I hope that you will join with me in making this possible. The film inspires us to reach across political divisions and to prioritize the needs of our youth and elders. We need more than memorials to sustain us. We need intergenerational relationship and soul force—an animating spirit of belonging that is the beloved community.

Special thanks to film participant, Carolyn Walden, for her insights and edits that helped to shape this essay.