After the rain comes the sun
I’ve lived in quiet expectation of great changes, of history suddenly answering the needs of “should.” All experience, written or lived, says change doesn’t work that way.
Six decades ago I helped take blankets into a cool June night where we spread them on the lawn and searched the Montana skies for the un-natural. We cuddled close, convinced of great changes because Russia had launched the first satellite. All lights were off, only the sound of water rushing down the hills. We fell asleep gazing into the universe. We awakened early, chilled and damp into a world that had not changed other than to show, through the night sky, a streak made by humans.
A decade later I was in Naples, Italy, waiting for an appointment with a military dentist on the UN base. I taught for the University of Maryland with a GS 13 rating, so I was allowed on base but had to wait for the dentist. I had been to the thieves’ market, the old town, the wharves, the remnants of antiquity, waiting for the dentist, more especially for the night’s event.
This was the night and I wanted to get as close as possible to experience this event. My credentials did not allow me upstairs, but I climbed backstairs to the top floor. The moon hung bright over the darkened hills of Naples. I leaned against the bricks to join the stillness, the awe, the image of what was happening out there on the moon at that very minute. I stood there exactly as it was happening—a man stepped on the moon and a woman stood watching from a window in Naples, Italy. Nothing could ever be the same again. How could we not change after such an event?
Headlines. A flair of national pride. The dentist. Life went on but not quite the same as it had been when poets were the true owners of the moon.
Years later I saw a Black man and his family walk into a November night in Chicago. Our next president: tall, slender, brilliant, black. They would move into a White House built by slaves, and he would lead an anxious country through anxious years. I loved the images of that November night. Again, I believed in the possibility of change, of being a nation of “we the people.”
We leaned toward the possible that November night and it has never left our awareness.
Now, these years later we are in the throes of a mad president and dozens of his lackeys who tear down not just part of the White House but every streak of decency, honesty, honor, and strength built into us, the Constitution, and our belief in it. This is not how we should or must be.
The military has adopted the term, “Boots on the ground,” to quantify force. Apply that elsewhere. Seven million people with signs of belief and honor. That means fourteen million feet on the ground, a quantity of “we the people” that cannot be quieted or ignored.
“Raining Democracy.” What a brilliant headline for what is happening. Rain brings new shoots, plants, health, and the certainty that we can outnumber, outvote, and outwit the witless stooges who follow an idiotic fascist wrapped in gold foil and the belief that a two-acre ballroom represents anything but his own sad life that will end for him as it does for all mortals.