By RAHN ADAMS
BOONE, N.C. (Feb. 25, 2026) – I was mindlessly streaming one YouTube music video after another this past weekend, and I ran across an old song that I hadn’t heard in years but that has regularly come to mind in various contexts.
It was Eagles founding member Don Henley’s solo hit, “The Heart of the Matter,” from his 1989 studio album, The End of the Innocence. The album came out the year before Henley founded the Walden Woods Project, a nonprofit organization that has been near and dear to my heart since July 2012 when Timberley and I went there — to Walden Woods and Walden Pond near Concord, Mass. — for the first time. I had been accepted for the week-long Approaching Walden seminar for high school teachers. It was the best professional development of my career.
Having been an Eagles fan since at least the summer of 1977, which was not long after the band’s multi-platinum-selling albums Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) and then Hotel California initially hit the pop charts and airwaves, I was hoping that during the week-long seminar at the Thoreau Institute, Henley himself might show up to greet us, especially since his band wasn’t on tour right then. He didn’t come around, wherever he was; instead, he sends me a fund-raising letter every year in December. Even though I know what it is when I see it in our post office box, I get a momentary thrill seeing Henley’s name on the return address.
So, yeah, Don Henley is one of my many musical heroes, but I also admire him for his environmental and conservation efforts to preserve the land around the most consequential “pond” in American literature, on whose far shore writer and philosopher Henry Thoreau lived and worked for two years, two months and two days. In a one-room cabin that he built for himself, Thoreau wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and started writing Walden; or, Life in the Woods.
I’ve also liked Henley because the Texan started out playing trombone in his high school band — the instrument that I played in school for eight long years — and because he was an English major in college before making the Dean’s List one semester and then dropping out without a degree. I have experience in that area, too, dropping out as a junior with a 4.0 grade point average before receiving my bachelor of arts degree in English about 10 years later than I should have.
That’s why I wasn’t surprised to listen carefully this past weekend to the lyrics of Henley’s “The Heart of the Matter” and recognize the song’s literary quality. Then I looked up the song’s title and found that renowned English novelist Graham Greene had written a best-selling novel in 1948 entitled The Heart of the Matter, and that Henley’s song lyrics could possibly deal with key aspects of the novel’s plot. Both works deal with forgiveness as the “heart of the matter” in interpersonal affairs.
The songwriter’s ever-relevant second verse goes like this: “These times are so uncertain, / there’s a yearning undefined / and people filled with rage. / We all need a little tenderness. / How can love survive / in such a graceless age? / The trust and self-assurance / that lead to happiness — / they’re the very things / we kill, I guess. / Pride and competition / cannot fill these empty arms; / and the work I put between us / you know it doesn’t keep me warm.” It’s all about forgiveness, he repeats several times in the song.
Forgiveness. That’s something I do think about more and more often nowadays, as we’re seeing that millions of our neighbors and former friends will soon need forgiveness — or grace — for their parts in supporting and enabling the most evil man who has ever held the highest office in our constitutional republic, a man who has done more than any other individual to destroy our democracy. Whether they themselves are racists, misogynists or just greedy bastards, they are our neighbors, and we can’t function as a society without them.
But as I’ve thought about why the refrain of Don Henley’s song is always running through my head — “I think it’s about forgiveness, / forgiveness, / even if, even if you don’t love me anymore” — it occurs to me that true forgiveness requires the person who seeks it to do something. A pardon without strings attached is grace. So, perhaps forgiveness is something we need to do for our own benefits — to let go of our own hurt and anger over the damage that has been done everywhere — and that grace is what the MAGA crowd needs from us even if they don’t think we’ll ever extend it to them.
After all, the scriptures that so many Trump supporters claim to follow say, “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8, KJV). Of course, that sentence was written by the Apostle Paul, who, some critics claim, actually corrupted the teachings of Jesus and created the brand of Christianity that is being further distorted by Christian Nationalists and white supremacists.
Why, then, would fundamentalist Christians require one to confess one’s sins, repent, and ask for God’s forgiveness if his saving grace is a free gift, according to the gospel tracts that my late father, an unapologetic fundamentalist preacher, used to hand out like Life Savers? And is something a gift if you have to do or believe anything to get it?
See? Salvation isn’t such a simple plan after all. Maybe our misguided neighbors need to forgive themselves first — by admitting to themselves that they shouldn’t have supported an evil man; by promising themselves that they will do whatever they can to make amends; and then by asking everyone they’ve hurt to forgive them.
If that can happen, I’m sure that — to paraphrase Paul again — our grace, as well as God’s, will be more than sufficient for MAGA folks to save themselves and, in so doing, save us all.