We will not be stunned into silence

For a minute amidst the inaugural Trump carnival of greed, cruelty, and stupidity, the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde grabbed the nation's attention by issuing a clear if gentle rebuke to the man and his enablers. 

Her words (and his scowls) grabbed the attention of anyone who wanted to listen. And that is a broad swath of us; it's worth remembering that even today at what is almost certainly the Trump show's high water mark of approval, he's never broken 50 percent. 

This all reminded me that such breakthroughs in what seems an irresistible tidal wave of societal ugliness do happen. Over and over.

I remember well the first occasion on which one of these breakthroughs grabbed me -- way back in the spring of 1969. The American war on Vietnam was at its height; the young men of my generation were being drafted to die in a fight that was at best meaningless and, in actuality, a crime. The US confronted the Soviet Union with our respective nuclear arsenals of mass death. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was dead and the movement for racial and economic justice stalled. It was a terrifying year.

And then, in print and on cassette tapes, a speech by someone I'd never heard of spread like wildfire among many young people. George Wald was a scientist, a professor, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1967. Speaking at an anti-war teach-in at MIT in March 1969, he somehow touched and lighted up a moral nerve for many worn down by the horror around us. His speech was called: A Generation in Search of a Future.

The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life. Our government has become preoccupied with death, with the business of killing and being killed.  ... I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me. But there are those students of mine, who are in my mind always, and there are my children, the youngest of them now seven and nine, whose future is infinitely more precious to me than my own. So it isn’t just their generation; it’s mine, too. We’re all in it together.

Are we to have a chance to live? We don’t ask for prosperity, or security. Only for a reasonable chance to live, to work out our destiny in peace and decency. Not to go down in history as the apocalyptic generation.

Our business is with life, not death. Our challenge is to give what account we can of what becomes of life in the solar system, this corner of the universe that is our home; and, most of all, what becomes of men [humankind]—all men, of all nations, colors, and creeds. This has become one world, a world for all ... It is only such a world that can now offer us life, and the chance to go on.

In that moment, Wald broke through. In the next month, the speech was broadcast in several cities, and reprinted in the New Yorker, the Progressive, the New York Post, Washington Post, Philadelphia Bulletin, Chicago Daily News, Buffalo Evening News, San Francisco Chronicle...

Many of us in a disheartened generation trudged on, making Richard Nixon's perfidious presidency impossible and inventing the environmental, women's, and gay movements.

I don't think Wald had all that in mind. But somehow his moral insight provided a jolt of humanizing energy in a bad moment.

These eruptions of some powerful truth spoken to powers, to rulers, are what make humans the tantalizingly hopeful species that we are. 

And they happen for different people at different times in different contexts. Does anyone remember Acting Attorney General Sally Yates' refusal to violate her oath to the Constitution at the beginning of the first Trump administration? 

Does anyone remember the masses of us who marched for justice and against police murders of Black and Brown people in the midst of a pandemic in 2020? 

Eruptions of truth and justice recur. Some are vast and some are small. And they are never just past and gone. Thanks Bishop Budde for reminding us!

What such breakthroughs in the enveloping shroud of injustice and violence do readers remember from their time on the planet?