B.C., before Covid, before 9/11, There was an "American Dream"narrative many believed. That dream followed Americans from childhood all the way through adulthood then well into the "Golden Years." We lived on a consistent message that these United States of America held a certain promise that was guaranteed by the words written into the U.S. Constitution before we were born. Before now, we took that promise for granted, assuming it would stand the test of time for all time, or at the very least, for our own lifetime! Think again, my fellow Americans.
In 2016, on a frigid, snowy Sunday morning in an historic, New England church where many sermons and hymns had been sung before, a retired minister stood up unapologetically to say that although it had not been his practice to speak politically from the pulpit, this day he knew he had to. He was about to send up a warning flare like the night the Titanic did so. In vain.
In the 1960's, his mother had been an activist, he said. She had spoken up and worked against those who tried to oppress all others who belonged to the "protected" classes* under the Constitution. She had taught her son to speak up and that brought him to where he was standing on this day before a small congregation in one of the poorest, most depressed cities in the State of Massachusetts. He told us that when his mother passed away, he discovered a full dossier of her activism assembled by the FBI. He, too, as a young man had been documented for his affiliations with his mother! That didn't stop either one of them from speaking up, out, and outloud about the injustices many Americans suffered on a daily basis.
Their words and actions, along with many others, were instrumental in making it possible for everyone to vote, regardles; making it possible for women to receive safe, legal reproductive health care in their own community; making it possible to find asylum from brutal dictators elsewhere; making it possible to become an educated citizen through local schools; making it possible to breathe clean air and drink safe water; making it possible to attend synagogue or mosque or church without fear. This was the short list of possibilities that the minister juxtaposed against the long list of Presidential candidates that Spring in 2016. Then, this retired minister living out his Golden Years, spoke like a prophet that morning:
"We thought we had addressed and resolved many of the wrongs. We were the ones who were wrong! All the hatred, all the prejudice, all the evil, had just gone into a Pandora's Box. Now, in 2016, someone has the key and is about to open it in the next four years."
In 2023, we can attest to those prophetic words having been written into our American story. We American citizens must face this truth head on before it's too late. Too late for what? To late to speak freely, to write freely, to read freely (almost too late already), and to vote freely, which is becoming as precarious as in dictatorships that so many people flee against all odds. Is this the ending we want to write?
In 2024 . . . If we do not wish our story of a free democracy to come to an end, we must, each of us, act now, speak up now, against that very real and very present danger against OUR Democracy.
In the end, Pandora did open that box and unleashed all that was evil on an innocent world. But, the preacher told us not to forget that inside the box, there was also Hope!
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*www.eeoc.gov race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information (including family medical history).
