This is our Rosa Parks moment. This is our Stonewall.

We stand on the shoulders of the greatness and bravery that came before us.  It’s our turn to stand up and demand not only our civil rights as citizens, but our humanity and our dignity in the face of a political party and a president elect bent on dragging us into the the cruelty and bigotry of the past. 

Those who have gone before us stood up to oppression and did not fear consequences that included arrest and trial on spurious charges and conviction for crimes they did not commit and even time in jail. They demanded respect and rights that had been denied to them. 

We stand on the shoulders of the Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee who marched silently carrying signs reading “I am a man” as they faced down armed National Guard troops.

We stand on the shoulders of Rosa Parks, who refused to be made to sit in the back of a public bus she had paid money to ride.

We stand on the shoulders of the gay and trans people in New York City who stood up to police beatings and arrests and said, we are not going to take it anymore.

We stand on the shoulders of Vietnam veterans who threw their medals over a fence around the Capitol and said, we will not fight your illegal wars anymore.

We stand on the shoulders of Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers who stood up and said we will not pick your fruits and vegetables for plantation wages.

We stand on the shoulders of women who demanded the rights to equal pay for equal work and the right to control their own bodies.

It is not our job to save America from itself.  We tried that with our votes.  This country will have to save itself in other ways.  Politics is not, as the saying goes, the art of the possible.  Most of all, politics is not the only mechanism by which democracy works. 

Democracy is in the notes strummed on a guitar, in the feet pounding the pavement on a picket line, in the face of a teacher helping children learn to read and write, in a brushstroke of paint on canvas, in the electrical charges across a transistor enabling communication, in the clang and bang and whirr of a newspaper press, in the cry of a newborn gasping a first breath, in the hush of a hospital corridor where the sick are healed, in the heat of a stove where soup boils to feed the hungry.

Look around you.  Democracy is everywhere.  It didn’t go away on Tuesday, the 5^th of November in 2024.  It’s in the text you just answered from a friend, in the eulogy read for a loved one who has died, in the sweet nothings whispered between lovers, in a question asked by a student in a seminar, in the silence of the desert or the mountains at night, in the stars above us and the dirt beneath our feet.

We must not fall into the trap of feeling that we are special because we strove with our votes for goodness and have been crushed by our losses at the polls.  When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, she did not even have the right to vote.  When the gay people at the Stonewall were arrested, loving someone of the same sex was illegal in most states, and they could not vote their way out of jail. 

I remember Moratorium Day at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1969.  There was a tiny protest outside the gates of the post – a few women, wives and girlfriends of soldiers, one with an infant in a stroller, all of them trying to stop their soldiers from being consumed by a war in Vietnam that everyone, including, we now know, the generals and the President of the United States knew could not be won. 

I remember their hand-drawn signs and the phalanx of military police behind them on the other side of the entrance to Fort Benning and the police facing them on the Columbus, Georgia side of the post gate.  I remember most of all their faces, frightened and amazed at what they were doing and the ruckus it had caused, but defiant as they shouted “Stop the war!  Bring them home!”

Democrats tried and failed to end that war in 1972 with their votes for George McGovern and lost.  Remember the magnitude of that loss?  Richard Nixon carried 49 of 50 states and won the popular vote by 18 million votes. 

What those protesters at Fort Benning wanted didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen. In 1973, the soldiers were brought home, and two years after that, the war ended because we lost it and pulled out of Vietnam militarily for good.  It was unrestrained power and idiocy that started the war in Vietnam.  It wasn’t the power of the vote in our democracy that ended that war.  It was hundreds of thousands of protesters just like those at Fort Benning who did it.

There are four long years before we can use our votes again to elect a new president, and two years before we can use them to make a difference in the House and Senate.   In the meantime, we are going to need our own Birmingham bus boycotts, our own Stonewall riots, our own sanitation strikes, our own college class walk-outs, our own marches on Washington.  We will need courage, we will need pride, we will need defiance, and we will need bodies.  We have done all this before.  We can save ourselves, and we can save the lives of others, by the force of our ideas and the righteousness of our cause.  All we need to do is to want it badly enough.