Bright gleam of our bright star
I confess: I have Obama-fever. My admiration morphed into something more like fandom when Airforce 1 touched down two days ago. I'd like to think it's not because he's an American celebrity, but more because he's a piece of American history. Especially but not only when he speaks, there's an echo of Martin Luther King Jr in his presence; a sense of somehow being larger than his particular moment. It's there when he drops a line like “History is on the side of the free,” as he did in his address to Parliament yesterday. In this line, and in his many “arc of justice” references, there's a more deliberate resonance of Dr King, drawn from the speech King gave in Georgia in August 1967, about eight months before his death. Though beleaguered and embattled, three-quarters through an extremely tough term, Obama seems still to stand in the sweep of the same arc, to be part of the same dream.
[L]et us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality, integrated education. Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity. Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied. And men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth [...] Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. And as we continue our charted course, we may gain consolation in the words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died.Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place
For which our fathers sighed?We have come over the way
That with tears hath been watered.
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered,Out from the gloomy past,
Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
Till now we stand at last
Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.