A Mountain of Despair; a Stone of Hope

Can anguish and alarm ever be a source of hope?

The vicious asphyxiation of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer has unleashed waves of righteous protest on a scale not seen in two generations. A pandemic and an economic downturn have brought into much sharper relief the injustices bred by 400 years of racism as African Americans suffer disproportionately from both scourges.

We are led by a president whose only response to political crisis is to take a hammer to the nation he leads. He seeks political domination by breaking us into warring legions.

He looks to the military dictator’s playbook as a guide for what it looks like to be strong. He uses the federal government’s power to violate the constitutionally guaranteed rights of non-violent demonstrators. He holds aloft a Bible that calls for love and justice to prop up a message worthy of Pharaoh.

There is an intensity of fear in the nation that goes beyond anything experienced in the previous 41 months of this reprehensible presidency. Facing electoral rejection because of his ineptitude in the face of COVID-19, Trump proved what many of us already knew: to hold power, he will shatter institutions and trample basic rights.

He seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the electoral system itself by lying about the effect of mail balloting and trying to deny millions the ability to vote. His promise to dispatch “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers” to our cities brings to mind Chile and Argentina under the generals.

This is a moment that demands a recommitment to our democratic faith - faith in the depth of our commitment to free government, faith in the long trajectory of our history, and faith in each other. “With this faith,” Martin Luther King Jr. taught us in 1963, “we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”

Faith, as the letter to the Hebrews tells us, is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Yet we also speak of “signs of faith,” moments when transcendence breaks through to reassure us that our faith is neither irrational nor a convenient invention.

And those signs are all around us. The mass nonviolent uprising is an index of the life of our democracy, not its death. In scores of cities and towns, hundreds of thousands of Americans, led by the young, have joined in multiracial gatherings to say: Enough.

The mobilization in response to George Floyd’s murder goes far beyond any previous public expressions of outrage over police killings of African Americans. Something snapped in our country. And polling indicates that the response to Floyd’s death and the ensuing demonstrations have increased support for the Black Lives Matter movement and decreased opposition.

It’s also striking that liberal politicians, who can become squeamish when the peaceful outspokenness of the vast majority is accompanied by the lawlessness of a small minority, have — so far at least - refused to be intimidated into withdrawing support for this movement.

They condemned the destruction, as have the organizers of this symphony for equality, but expressed understanding of the rage.

In what may be a turning point in the 2020 campaign, former Vice President Joe Biden condemned Trump for turning the nation into “a battlefield riven by old resentments and fresh fears,” spoke with candor about our nation’s failure to confront “systemic racism,” and proposed concrete steps forward.

Far from reflecting a fear of white backlash, Biden’s speech suggested an awareness that the moment requires resolve, not timidity.

Trump’s threats to abuse our armed forces by deploying them for his political ends drew condemnation from military leaders who until now have been reluctant to dissent. Thus did retired Navy Adm.

Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, denounce Trump for his “disdain for the rights of peaceful protest” and for giving “succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our domestic strife.”

And Trump’s vulgar appropriation of religious symbols led even the most moderate faith leaders to express disgust - and to call out the president’s pious apologists within their own ranks. “I find it baffling and reprehensible,” Washington’s Roman Catholic Archbishop Wilton Gregory said of Trump’s visit to the shrine honoring St. John Paul II, “that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people.”

The darkest hour does not always come before the dawn. But the evidence is all around us that Trump has failed to eliminate the democratic antibodies that have come to our nation’s rescue before.

We cannot lose faith in our capacity to overcome - again.