What now?

Maybe that's the wrong question.

Photo by Rita Seneca on Unsplash

I’m sitting in my church office on Inauguration Day. The office is officially closed for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but I am here because in about an hour I will join other clergy at a citywide worship service in honor of the great humanitarian and civil rights activist. And I am trying, really trying, to come to grips with the fact that an individual who desecrates everything the Rev. Dr. King stood for has just been handed the reins to the most powerful government in the world. And people are celebrating.

Not everyone is, of course. At least half the nation is in a kind of mourning and in fear of all of the damage to come. I don’t need to document it here. We all know what’s been said and threatened over the past months and years along the exhausting trail of lies and insults and outrages that just over half of American voters said, yep, that’s who we are. He’s our standard, our hero. Look, children, look. Now, Tommy, go kick the crap out of the kid next door in a wheelchair. What a loser. Nobody wants to see that.

And so many of us may be wondering, even while still in shock, a shock that has not abated since November 5 … what now?

Maybe there’s a better question.

My mother once shared something with me that I’ve never forgotten. It was about the fact that she’d had so many kids — there are seven of us. She said whenever someone asked her, “Margaret, with so many children, do you have a favorite? Which one do you love the most?” she said she would answer, “Whichever one needs me the most.”

I was young when I first heard this, maybe 12 or 13, and even then I found it wise — not to mention reassuring, for this guaranteed me a spot in the favorite chair at least some of the time. As I grew older, though, I wondered whether what my mother described ever really happened. I mean, who would ask a parent that?

Now, as I’m even older, I have a different theory. I prefer to think that my mother was telling me a parable, a way to reassure the nervous young me that being needy was actually okay. (It’s highly likely I was being very needy in that moment.)

And so, thinking of today, where those of us with a liberal political bent are feeling un-favorited in myriad ways, our morals rejected, our reliance on truth and justice almost mocked, I don’t doubt many of us are asking ourselves and our likeminded friends and family, “What now?” But maybe the real question is, “Who now?”

Not who as in “Who should be our political leaders? Who will fight for us and with us?” No, who as in, “Who do I help now? Who do I love the most? Who needs me the most?”

I was born male and white. The disturbing fact is that for all the cruelty to come, I will still remain relatively unscathed. I may be stressed out, I may not sleep at night, but I am not at risk the way, say, a transgendered person is, or a Haitian immigrant, or a woman needing reproductive health care, or someone carrying a Black Lives Matter sign. Or a Ukrainian. Or someone in a same-sex marriage. I won’t bear the brunt of the triumph of the new president’s will.

I can’t change what’s happening now in our political landscape. But I can help others live in it with me. So tomorrow, I will be talking with my wife, Janice, about where we will direct our social justice efforts and support, be it financial or in body or in spirit. Frankly, we’ve already been talking about it.

That’s what we were doing this past Saturday, when Janice and I joined the People’s March in our local community. There were about 200 of us, marching down our downtown street, many of us chanting, “What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!”

Maybe those are the wrong questions, too. As Dr. King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We may not get to the kind of freedom we have dreamed of right now. We may have to do more work — again — to restore what we have long fought for — again. But that arc is still bending. Love is weighty. And if we reach out to one another in love, and enough of us are pulling down on that arc, it will bend further and further, so that, as King also said in a 1968 sermon, “Drum Major Instinct,” we can make of this old world a new world.

It can happen. If we take care of enough who’s, maybe, just maybe the whats will take care of themselves. Because there are many more decent people in this world than there are those worshipping at the new altar of emptiness. And there is much all of us can do, right now. It’s only a matter of finding that someone who needs you the most — right now.