Or think of the Hallelujah Chorus.
Remember Barbra Streisand singing "Don't Rain on My Parade."And then there is *A Piece of Sky, with Yentel, an Jewish immigrant, on the boat to America, singing “Why settle for just a piece of sky?” and holding that last note longer than is humanly possible
It was with quivering fingers that I opened the computer and typed in “2026 election results”:
And the Hallelujah chorus rang out.
I was happy about it, but still felt I was suffering
from jet lag.
And now under my desk, my space heater is singing, a
little whine that sounds like music. At first, I thought it was picking up a
radio station, like when I was a kid, people claimed they could hear the radio
through their tooth fillings.
And last Tuesday, Old Blue hit a Crescendo. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
I was happy about it, but still felt I was suffering from jet lag.
There is something about critical mass—a speech, a
book, a dent in a belief system —all of those need to reach a certain decibel
level before they are heard.
It took a company slamming down the Jimmy Kimmel show
to get people's attention regarding censorship. Even people who didn't like
Kimmel wanted to preserve his First Amendment right to free speech.
It took a group of monks, a small group, actually, 13,
I think, plus one dog, to start a movement of Kindness. Throngs followed
them—that’s when the crescendo happened. Monks walked in the bitter cold, and
people stood in the snow or rain to encourage and thank them, to offer flowers
and fruit or water. Those nearby followed them; others followed them on Instagram.
All felt the love and kindness of those walking only for peace. (Except for
those who attacked them for not being Christian—so much for brotherly love.)
The No King’s Marches helped us know that we
were not alone in wanting to keep our hard-fought freedoms. We saw that
others wanted that as well—even if the President wanted to dump excrement on
us. Indeed, he mimed it on Truth Social.
As one person, we often feel impotent.
If you stepped out of line to protest in an internment camp, you’d be shot; end of protestor.
But as many, we are formidable.
We found that we can’t grow complacent. We must
constantly guard our rights and freedoms, because some will take them away for
their own gain.
It’s an old fact.
And Texas, bless you. Years ago, I was in Dallas right
after Barack Obama had been elected President. A young clerk in the gift shop
and I struck up a conversation, and together we celebrated Obama’s victory. She
was an awakening for me, for I had thought (wrongfully) that Texans were
basically conservative; maybe they were, I don’t know, but light shines
everywhere. A lesson one learns by traveling.
During this fiasco from the last two T elections, a T
supporter told me I had been lied to. Duh. All the while, I was trying to find
the truth in the mess we had created. I guess that insinuated that she
knew the truth. It wasn’t so much that she disagreed with me that set me off,
but that condescending, “Poor little thing, she believes the lies.”
“I said, Bullshit!” and haven't heard from her since.
And I don’t know where in my brain to put the people
who somehow think of T as a Messiah, a pedophile messiah; now that’s a hot one.
My daughter, caring for a paraplegic man, was stuck in a MAGA conversation the
day after the midterm elections. First, they were lamenting how they could
survive the next two years. It sounded like the group wanted to bring about
Armageddon. Maybe they want the rapture, which will wipe all of us out except
for them. They will be the ones to inherit the earth. The loudest of the group
was a man who bragged about having dead deer hanging in his garage, and it
isn’t deer season. “I didn’t kill it, he said, “it was given to me.”
I don’t know, maybe it was struck by a car. I don’t
understand it, but people who want the opposition dead still get a vote.
This appeared in my email box yesterday:
“When it comes to biblical understanding,
I always remember how Rachel Held Evans wisely wrote about interpreting the
Bible, “If you are looking for verses with which to support slavery, you will
find them. If you are looking for verses with which to abolish slavery, you
will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you
will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to liberate or honor
women, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to wage war, you will
find them. If you are looking for reasons to promote peace, you will find them.
If you are looking for an out-dated, irrelevant ancient text, you will find it.
If you are looking for truth, believe me, you will find it.
“This is why there are times when the
most instructive question to bring to the text is not “what does it say?”, but
“what am I looking for?”
“There are people who do want to hate the
world, and so they will look for any excuse in the scriptures to justify that.
Some genuinely believe it, more’s the pity, but others simply benefit from the
consequences of it, so they’ll say it until you believe it anyway. The
conviction that God hates everything and it will all burn someday can leave a
mark on a person.”
Thank you, Sarah Bessey.
And bless Substack for providing a platform where
people can vent their frustrations, where brilliant people probe into how and
why we got ourselves into this political mess. It is a soft place to fall. And
then there is a man with the audacity to call himself God, who can spit out the
truth and humor in equal measure.
I love you guys.
"The first sign of corruption in a
society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means."
–George Bernanos.
