Longer Daylight Coming
Raising her right hand while resting her left on a stack of six banned books, Karen Smith takes the oath of office as president of the Central Bucks, PA school board. This gorgeous swearing-in gesture symbolizes Smith’s fight for students’ freedom to read empowering books. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s Night tops her list of rescued books, his personal story of teenaged survival in a Nazi death camp published in 1960.
Prompted by mention of Wiesel’s Night, I remember a particular group of students who would read his memoir toward our semester’s end. On the morning of September 12, 2001, I’m driving up the hill to the community college for office hours followed by teaching their Introduction to Philosophy course. The day before a student in each of my classes lost his brother, one in the plane crash outside Shanksville, PA and the other at the attack on the Pentagon. Though buses discharge passengers and cars stream into parking lots, a loud hush fills the main college building.
A tear-stained student in hijab nods at the door and tiptoes into my office. She sits, disconsolate. We sit, disconsolate. She lifts her head and speaks. “May I chant an Islamic prayer for light in our class today?” The semester only in its third week, her classroom includes local students of varying educational backgrounds and international students from a handful of countries. Awareness of a larger world differs dramatically among thirty students only beginning to know each other.
We walk silently together across the courtyard. Her sad, shocked classmates drop their books on desks and selves into chairs. She stands, pauses, explains, hesitates, begins. And then. Her face, all their faces—her breath, all their breaths. Solace and inclusion unite strangers. What an unimaginable happening, yet how natural it feels. That morning’s bonding always exists as a possibility, indeed probability, when given a chance.
Tomorrow brings us this year’s shortest period of daylight. Bit by bit, each day the light will last longer. Fortunately, sometimes we can stare directly at headlights on high beam, warmed by their glow.
High-beamers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss brighten the darkness. These Georgia election workers exemplify the best of this country.
They testified before the January 6 Committee, detailing the crushing, reckless racism that radically and forever changed their lives. Rabid loony goons used the tired myth of Black voter fraud in their futile effort to upend the Georgia presidential vote count which they knew to be accurate. On December 15, 2023, unanimous jury members awarded Freeman and Moss compensatory and punitive damages, totaling $148,169,000, for criminal defamation that devastated them and all who love them. Counsel for Freeman and Moss, which includes members of Protect Democracy, stated in closing arguments that the defendant “has no right to offer up defenseless civil servants to a virtual mob in order to overturn an election.” Protect Democracy’s website inspires, featuring goals that include protection of free and fair elections, defense of the rule of law, the countering of disinformation, and shaping the democracy of tomorrow.
After the victorious ruling, the daughter/mother defendants speak.
Shaye Moss: “Our greatest wish is that no one – no election worker or voter or school board member or anyone else – ever experiences anything like what we went through…. I know I won’t be able to retire from my job with the county like my grandmother did. But I hope that by us taking these big steps – these very big steps – towards justice that I can make her just as proud.”
Ruby Freeman: “Money will never solve all my problems. I can never move back to the house I call home. I will always have to be careful about where I go, and who I choose to share my name with. I miss my home, I miss my neighbors, and I miss my name.” Freeman concludes that “Today is not the end of the road. We still have work to do.”
Watching from his porch “Before Dark,” Wendell Berry follows a bird’s winged tripping from way up river to far down and out of sight. “A kingfisher wild in flight / he could only have made for joy.” The poet waits comfortably, listening for sounds of night time splashing heralding the kingfisher’s return.
Esperanza Spalding’s voice makes real “dancing for joy” with “undulating grace” in “Afro Blue.” Piano and bass—drums and flute. Each instrument alone—all instruments together. Kingfishers guided by delight and dancers dazzled by the night. What next? Virtuoso Spalding leaves us bottoms-up “Overjoyed.” She rolls enunciated syllables and zinged strings into one. Do “the odds seem improbable” for overjoy? Well, “though you don’t believe that they do, dreams do come true.”
“As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse,” Billy Collins sits in a ladder-back chair and carefully arranges on a table an orange, marble, aspirin—the sun, earth, moon. Pouring a glass of wine, the poet starts singing “a homemade canticle of thanks.” Such splendor in this world! Clouds, geese, oak. Collins confesses while refilling his wine glass: “I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.”
Side by side we’re “The Lucky Ones,” believe the Pentatonix singers, “look how far we’ve come.” Their performance, highlighted by an exposed light bulb, reminds us that we can dream while wide awake. “Hand in hand, we stumble and fall / then we stand, once and for all.”