Beyond the Present Wilderness

This week I am taking a break from my usual essay on history. This week we will all have the opportunity to participate in history.

Our nation has lasted for a quarter of a millennium. It is now under a great and mysterious strain. That strain has many sources, and it’s been building for a long time. We are approaching a crisis.

Those of the founding generation had faith in the people. They abjured kings and handed the sovereignty of the country to its citizens. It was something entirely new.

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Thomas Paine wrote in 1776.

Voting is everything.

“This process of election,” Alexander Hamilton said, “affords a moral certainty that the office of President will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Most of us simply go to the polls. Others have had to struggle for the right to cast a ballot. Women were jailed for demanding suffrage. John Lewis marched for voting rights at Selma in 1965 and had his skull fractured in the process. He knew what a vote was worth.

“My greatest fear,” Lewis said, “is that one day we may wake up and our democracy is gone.”

“Lean toward the whispers of your own heart,” he advised. “When it is your time don't be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice.”

Dorothea Lange took this photograph in Kern County, California, in 1938.

The last word must be left to a poet. In 1936, during another stressful time, Carl Sandburg wrote a long poem, The People, Yes.

. . . Saying yes to the smoke, yes to the flags,
Yes to the paradoxes of democracy,
Yes to the hopes of government
Of the people by the people for the people,
No to debauchery of the public mind,
No to personal malice nursed and fed.

. . . Yes to man as a struggler amid illusions,
Each man fated to answer for himself:
Which of the faiths and illusions of mankind
Must I choose for my own sustaining light
To bring me beyond the present wilderness?

. . . Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
The people march.

It’s time to choose. This is our country.

If we vote, we prevail.