This post is not so easy to write. It’s about a subject that has troubled me for some time, but I haven’t thought about it in a productive way. The subject concerns the early promise of America, set against its more recent decline. As you’ll see, these thoughts comprehend both degradation and hope. Let’s start with some lyrics from a Bruce Springsteen song, My City of Ruins:

There’s a blood red circle,
on the cold dark ground,
and the rain is falling down.
The church door’s thrown open,
I can hear the organ’s song,
But the congregation’s gone.

My city of ruins
My city of ruins

Now the sweet veils of mercy,
drift through the evening trees.
Young men on the corner,
like scattered leaves.
The boarded up windows,
The hustlers and thieves,
While my brother’s down on his knees.

My city of ruins
My city of ruins

Come on rise up!
Come on rise up!

Now there’s tears on the pillow
darling where we slept.
and you took my heart when you left.
Without your sweet kiss,
my soul is lost, my friend.
Now tell me how do I begin again?

My city’s in ruins
My city’s in ruins

Now with these hands,
I pray Lord with these hands,
for the strength Lord with these hands,
for the faith Lord with these hands,
I pray Lord with these hands,
for the strength Lord with these hands,
for the faith Lord with these hands.

Come on rise up!
Come on rise up!
Rise up

Bruce Springsteen

How often do you hear a prayer in a song by a rock star? This song is a lament, an anthem, a prayer, and a call to act in one poem.

What leader uses religious language and imagery in a political speech, or in a political context? Who have you heard talk like that since Martin Luther King? What president, since Abraham Lincoln?

The times call for a sense of urgency. That was King’s constant theme: we have to act now. Read his famous letter, a response to his critics, written while incarcerated in a prison in Birmingham. Other leaders pleaded with him to slow down – look what might happen, they said, now is not the right time. King replied, we have waited a hundred years since the Civil War, three hundred years since the founding, and you tell us to wait? You tell us now is not the right time? We have waited all this time for the freedom God gave us when we were born. We won’t wait any longer.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Now, fifty years after King led the civil rights movement, we are all losing the rights he sacrificed himself for. We’re compelled to watch a hard-won reservoir of good will, integrity, and hope for freedom drain away while comfortable overlords, corrupt courtiers, and thieves steal our money and our rights. Dreadful robocops beat us with their batons, just as Bull Connor beat defenseless civil rights marchers in Birmingham. SWAT teams and other hyper-active, uniformed enforcers shoot us, just as Klanners lynched people impunitively. We cannot let this happen to us, or to our fellows. Rise up.