Stand for Something > Fall for Anything

“Forty acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music.”

For the past ten days, the singular chord reverberating within me has been the call for moral courage. This is not a one-note tone. It’s layered. Moody. It echoes with clarity, with caution, with compassion and concern. Most days, it ends with a question mark. Where can it be found? Is it reasonable to expect moral courage in 2025? Has it fallen out of fashion?

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“You have to stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything.”

- my dad, throughout my childhood

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Lately, my body feels like it’s 2020, back when I realized that for months on end, I had thought about death. The thoughts were more fleeting on some days than on others, but I never skipped a day. My discipline was at its peak. In the earlies days of the pandemic, one of my co-workers said he “prayed a hedge of protection” around The Window. God promised him no one would be harmed, so we needn’t bother with masks, he said. We were playing into the “their” hands.

J was the first person I knew who died. To this day, when I’m driving down Wilden Avenue, I remember the time I saw him walking his golden lab along the Pumpkinvine trail, wearing his knee brace, whistling in the sunshine. I wonder if his church ever apologized to his widow, if they paid his funeral expenses, if they dared, for even a second, to look in the mirror and face the facts.

Five years later, the news cycle has become a different sort of wake.

Five years later, I know for sure that churches don’t apologize.

“When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act.” - John Lewis

Last Tuesday, I woke up nervous and exhausted, just like 2020. I forced myself to ignore the Bad News Bear charging on my nightstand and wandered into the living room in search of solace. This was easier than it was in 2020. My house was quiet, and empty. (Part of me wished it wasn’t.) From where I sat, there were 45 books in my sight-line. (I wish I were exaggerating - I just counted.) I plucked one from the stack, a book I had accidentally abandoned over the past month (a common symptom of having 45 books in one room.)

Here’s what I read:

“assuming responsibility for what we do, say, and share will involve creatively contemplating together with others what it means to know (or claim to know) something. This is the prophetic task of a genuinely examined life in an age of disinformation.”

and…

“Institutional cowardice, we know all too well, is tyranny’s air supply. Who are you going to be in the face of injustice?”

from We Become What We Normalize: What We Owe Each Other in World That Demand Our Silence by David Dark

When I consider our collective craving for moral courage, I am not only thinking of political terror. (Or am I, since almost everything is inherently political?) I am speaking of an entire culture that grooms its citizens to look the other way, to sit motionless in the rowboat; to, as Uncle Sam¹ says, “Tighten! Up!”

I read reports about closed room conversations where Republicans wrung their hands over Trump’s autocratic march then publicly sided with him, scared witless about the personal risks of standing for what they know to be right. I was warned about my political posts by someone who admits to not following the news. I was bullied by scared people.

On Saturday we laughed until we cried with people who know our unabridged back stories. On Sunday, we watched Kendrick Lamar televise the revolution wearing bell bottom jeans. On Monday, half of us gave a grinning, Nobel Prize-winning poet his flowers while the other half barely concealed their threat level through mockery. People who knew nothing about Kendrick and are starved of curiosity named it, “The worst halftime show ever,” ignoring these receipts: