That Infinite Cascade of Ripples Flowing Out from This Rare Gem Stone Soul Dropped into the Great Salt Sea of Our National Psyche (For John Lewis)

"You are the light. Never let anyone—any person or any force—dampen, dim or diminish your light. Study the path of others to make your way easier and more abundant. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates. […] Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won. Choose confrontation wisely, but when it is your time don't be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice. And if you follow your truth down the road to peace and the affirmation of love, if you shine like a beacon for all to see, then the poetry of all the great dreamers and philosophers is yours to manifest in a nation, a world community, and a Beloved Community that is finally at peace with itself.” - John Lewis, Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America (2012)

John Lewis in Newly Unearthed Mugshots in the 1960s,

 (Nashville Police Department), Smithsonian Magazine, 12/1/16

I am not a sentimentalist. At least not about death. I have been around too much of it. I know what it is, I know what it isn't. I don't do obituaries. I don't write them, read them or post them. I get it, I understand the need. I understand the function, I just don't do obituaries. I am not a "rest in peace" person, I am not a "sorry for your loss" person. My relationship with death is seemingly paradoxical: On the terrestrial plane, I am an existentialist -- when someone falls, they fall, they're gone. I live with the living. I don't look back, I lean forward. But on the occult plane, I know with utter certainty that what the humans call "death" is not what they imagine it to be. The terrestrial life and work of a great being, whether in the arts, the sciences or in politics (yes, I said politics), it just the beginning in one sense, or the continuation in another sense, resulting in an infinite cascade of ripples through all time and space, i.e., all being. Death is death. Period. Full stop. Death is not death. Period. Full stop.
Can you embrace this divine paradox? Sooner or later, you will have to.
So this is is not an obituary for Rep. John Lewis, D-GA. This is a dispatch from the barricades where John Lewis stood, leaning forward on the terrestrial plane, advancing the front line with each forward step. He has fallen. We must hold the line, and advance the line. Step by step. But meanwhile, on the occult plane, that infinite cascade of ripples that flow out from this rare gem stone soul dropped into the great salt sea of the human psyche, that infinite cascade has only just begun ...
Any truthful dispatch from the front line of this forward movement cannot help but also be a call to non-violent action, the facts compel it, reality itself compels it, the narrative demands it, mass action on the streets, yes, but also court action, legislative action, social and cultural action within our own interpenetrating circles and holiest of all, electoral action (yes, the vote, your vote).
The terrestrial life of John Lewis embodied all of these actions, and the occult life of John Lewis, that infinite cascade of rippling Love Supreme (yes, I bow to the great Coltrane), the occult life of John Lewis' "good trouble" moves forward world without end ...
As a citizen, as a human being, I have spent almost all of my life on these barricades, one way or another, many of us have, whether for you that means a decade or two, or as for me too many decades ... But for as long as I have stood on this barricade and leaned forward, I could hear the voice of John Lewis somewhere along the line ...

• "Mr. Lewis was arrested 40 times from 1960 to 1966. He was repeatedly beaten senseless by Southern policemen and freelance hoodlums. During the Freedom Rides in 1961, he was left unconscious in a pool of his own blood outside the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Montgomery, Alabama." - John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80, New York Times, 7/17/20

A brave voice, a true voice, a voice that did not falter, a voice that always spoke from a place of adamantine love and determination ...

• Civil rights icon and US Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia made a surprise appearance at this year's "Bloody Sunday" commemorative march in Selma, Alabama, where he delivered an impassioned plea to voters to use the ballot box as "a nonviolent instrument or tool to redeem the soul of America." Lewis, who had his skull broken by white police officers during the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer in December ... "We were beaten, we were tear-gassed. I thought I was going to die on this bridge. But somehow and some way, God almighty helped me here," Lewis said in an emotional speech on Sunday at the apex of the bridge. "We must go out and vote like we never, ever voted before." "I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to give in. We're going to continue to fight. We need your prayers now more than ever before," he said. "We must use the vote as a nonviolent instrument or tool to redeem the soul of America." - John Lewis urges attendees of Selma's 'Bloody Sunday' commemorative march to 'redeem the soul of America' by voting, CNN, 3/1/20

I remember it all ... 

In 2000, the shell of a man formerly known as Ralph Nader declared that there was no difference between Bush and Gore, and there he was in the final days before the election, campaigning in Florida. Gore won, but Bush was sworn in. Not all of Al Gore's votes got counted, but enough of Nader's votes got counted to turn the electoral college, and the country, over to Cheney and Rove. Al Gore wouldn't have invaded Iraq or pulled out of the Kyoto Climate Accords or ...  

So, in 2016, tell me, in Moscow in December 2015, was Mike Flynn Dr. Stein's dinner date, or was she Vladimir Putin's dinner date? Or was it a dirty tricks menage a trois? Like the shell of a man formerly known as Ralph Nader before her, Jill Stein told you that there was not enough of a difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Clinton won, but Stein's votes (and her "recount efforts" in key battleground states turned the electoral college, and the country, over to Putin and put his weaponized clown in the White House. "I'm the last thing standing between you and the Apocalypse," Clinton warned, and she was right. 

In between, of course, Barack Obama held the high ground, setting the U.S. on an incremental but inexorable path to universal healthcare, signing the U.S. on to the Paris Climate Agreement, and not only avoiding war with Iran, but working successfully with the other world powers to arrive at a peace agreement. But throughout it all, even as Citizens United hollowed out our democratic institutions, some among us, those who had become toxic, those who had lost touch with reality, chose to spend the eight years carping at Obama and the "Democratic Establishment." They had learned nothing from 2000.

And, in 2000, in 2012, in 2020, do you know what I told those I knew who argued that there was no difference (or not enough) between the two major parties and who argued for a third party or just don't even bother to vote? I said, "I will leave the Democratic Party when John Lewis leaves it." If he felt it was worth fighting for, then so did I. None of them had any real response to that. It was inevitably the end of the argument. Oh, some of them went ahead and threw away their votes, but they had no answer to my reason for not throwing away mine. Because, well, John Lewis ...

Yes, for as long as I have stood on this barricade and leaned forward, I could hear the voice of John Lewis somewhere along the line ...

Throughout his life, John Lewis not only put his shoulder to bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice, he also stood at the fulcrum of history.

Consider John Lewis in January 2009 and in January 2017 --

• As Obama left his swearing in, Lewis approached him with a sheet of paper and asked the new President, the first black President, to sign it. And he did. He wrote, “Because of you, John. Barack Obama.” - David Remnick, The Ongoing Struggle of John Lewis, New Yorker, 12/30/19

• In an exclusive interview with NBC News' "Meet the Press," Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., said he does not believe Donald Trump is a "legitimate president," citing Russian interference in last year’s election ... When pressed to explain why, he cited allegations of Russian hacks during the campaign that led to the release of internal documents from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign co-chairman, John Podesta. “I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton,” Lewis told NBC News. - Rep. John Lewis: 'I Don't See Trump as a Legitimate President', NBC News, 1/13/17

As a young man, John Lewis was arrested and beaten over and over again, in non-violent resistance, and as an elder statesman he often broke into dances of jubilation after speaking on the campaign trail. Whether surrounded by hate or love, John Lewis led. But now he has fallen.

And you and I are still here at this barricade, leaning forward, advancing the front line step by step. 

On the terrestrial plane, his dances of jubilation have ceased, but on the occult plane, that infinite cascade of ripples still flows out from this rare gem stone soul dropped into the great salt sea of our national psyche ...

• Lewis was sitting in the Supreme Court chamber when it heard a challenge to the Voting Rights Act and told me he almost cried when Justice Antonin Scalia compared the VRA to a “racial entitlement.” He called the decision gutting the law “a dagger into the very heart of the Voting Rights Act.” (I tell this story in my 2015 book Give Us the Ballot, which extensively details Lewis’s long fight for voting rights and which he reviewed for the Washington Post.) ... In December 2019, Lewis presided over the House as it passed legislation to restore and modernize the Voting Rights Act, requiring states with a long history of voting discrimination to once again get federal approval for any changes to voting procedures. In a primary season marred by voting problems, like six-hour lines in Lewis’ home state of Georgia, it’s been sitting on Mitch McConnell’s desk for 225 days. - Ari Berman, John Lewis’ Legacy Is the Right to Vote. And It’s Under Attack, Mother Jones, 7/18/20

This is the great battle of our time. This is it. All of the praying, the marching, the voting, the decades, it all comes down to this November, and to the dangerous time between this November and next January. The demographics are with us, the arc of the moral universe is accelerating, evolution has been grinding on relentlessly. The Death-Eater Overlords' stranglehold on the electoral college is  going to be broken. A second consecutive tsunami is building. A 2020 #BlackLivesMatter tsunami to follow on the 2018 #MeToo tsunami. A united front for sanity and decency is coalescing, Right, Left and Center. We must survive the pandemic and save the republic.

The forces of evil (yes, evil, it's a diagnosis not a moral judgment) have a ruthless grip on the levers of power, but if we take the Senate and topple #MoscowMitch, it's all over for them. In spite of the dirty tricks, the information warfare, the vote suppression, the dark money, the gerrymandering, the electoral college, in spite of all of it ... a new world is coming, the great shift is already underway ... we must not fail to show up for this moment ...

John Lewis died a few days ago at the age of 80. I found myself pondering the length of his life, how deep into it he had gone, and how the sands in the hourglass finally ran out. 80 years. And then it occurred to me, he was only fourteen years older than me. Fourteen years ...

Pull yourselves together. Make #GoodTrouble. Lean forward. Make #GoodTrouble. Vote. 

-- Richard Power is the Author of "I, the Dragon: Chronicles of An Epic Life Among the Humans" and "Wyrds of Power: New Language for A New Reality." Both are available from Amazon.com.

55th Anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," Selma, Alabama 3/1/20

President Barack Obama awards the 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom to Congressman John Lewis in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House February 15, 2011