The Horror and the Hope

The worst of times bring out the best in people

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According to the Hebrew scripture, after the Jewish people suffered many years of worsening slavery and violence, Moses marched them out to the banks of the Red Sea with the formidable Egyptian army in fast pursuit. In that worst of moments, faith and hope saved them.

According to Christian scripture, when a baby born in a barn to a poor unwed mother was threatened by a maniacal king who started killing all the male babies born to Jewish women, hope and faith, as they escaped for asylum in another nation, saved them.

When Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery, and then went back down South(!) to free other slaves, it was her faith and hope which saved her. A decade later, hundreds of thousands of slaves were leaving the plantations to join up with the Union Army in what W. E. B. Du Bois called the greatest strike of all time. Less than five years after that, the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery was enacted into law.

When Alice Paul and her friends were arrested and went on a hunger strike in 1917, and their jailers force fed them and sent them to the horrible psychiatric wards, it was faith and hope that saved them. Two later, the Constitutional Amendment giving women the right to vote was enacted into law.

When Martin Luther King, Jr was stabbed and repeatedly threatened; when those four little girls died in the bombing of a Birmingham church; when Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman were brutally murdered in Mississippi; when the Freedom Riders and John Lewis were beaten within an inch of their lives, it was the faith and hope of the Civil Rights Movement that kept them marching on to great victories in the years to come.

We are living in one of the most horrific times in American history. Due process is denied to more and more people; Americans are being arrested on the basis of their skin color. Armed masked men, paid by our government, are storming random apartment buildings and invading schools to snatch children away from their parents. Millionaires and billionaires are getting more and more power and money while poor and working-class children are being denied health care and food. Gigantic corporations are crushing small businesses, workers, and consumers.

There is evil abroad in the land.

But there is great hope as well. Millions showing up in the streets, accompanied by people dressed up as frogs and millipedes. Local and statewide elections being won, one after the other, in opposition to Trump and MAGA. People showing up for each whenever ICE shows up, to blow whistles or just walk children to school. Lawyers working with citizens and non-profit groups to win one court case after another.

The people are pushing back.

For all its flaws, American democracy is too strong to give up without a fight. Americans like living in the land of the free, and they are supporting their neighbors who are being attacked.

Thomas Paine, whose pen did more to inspire and save the American revolution than any other man’s, wrote after a horrific first year of the revolution:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

On hope and faith in the face of evil and oppression, he added:

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

MLK Jr. spoke eloquently about hope and faith for the future in his iconic “I Have A Dream” speech:

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

Hope and faith. It is what kept King and the other civil rights leaders going, and what kept all those that came before them going. It is what must and will keep all of us going. We must have the faith that out of this horror will come a time when our country is restored to us, better than before.

As Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, the nation we are fighting for was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all were created equal.” We must resolve with Lincoln that our nation will indeed “have a new birth of freedom, and that our government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not perish from the earth.”

Yes, it has been a horrible year. But it has also been a year of hope and joy as we rise up together to fight the good fight. I am proud to be part of the progressive movement fighting to make sure that government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not perish from the earth.