Earlier this week I attended a panel discussion, at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, on New Health and Economic Research on Work and Family Policies in the United States and Canada, hosted by the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
When entering the chamber.. I realized that I'd been in the building once before -exactly 10 years previous -to attend a hearing on the Voting Rights Act, ahead of the vote for its re-ratification. ..remembering this left me with a strange sensation of having just 'passed my younger self in the hall', so to speak.. -but it seems my politics and sense of historic timing remain congruent.. -as, at that very moment of remembering, Congressman John Lewis was, again, offering a civics lesson, and exampling social activism in the cause of making sense of a senseless current political impasse..
I say "again" because that example was what was occurring, in June 2006, when I was first in the Dirksen Senate Office Building - and witness to this Congressman's reason, leadership, and eloquent social consciousness, trying to face an unconscionable situation, with a rightful sense of Justice. In our current moment of history, he speaks to gun control; in 2006, he was speaking to equality.
But in every direction of his efforts, Congressman Lewis is always leading a call to shine a light upon the dank currents that surge to sink a rightful debate beneath the rhetoric of a divisive oppression, remnant and resonant of our cultural history.. ..charging us to insist on change.. and imbuing a path ahead with a power of process that is informed by a long procession of souls who exampled leadership in defining an invigorating paradigm of non-violent, social activism.. We may wrestle up and down, through ongoing time, and returning issues of inequity ..imbalance, and ignorance.. But it is instructive to remember that change is incremental; that calling out injustice has purpose; and that in the siege of politics, a permanence of our government -it is a constant, non-violent courage that is best heard above the fray..