After the Lightning

...it is pronounced over the bodies of all the great martyrs of the spirit...

...In such social waters the lightest and least honest minds have tended to rise to the surface, for the man who honestly despairs of men must also despair of himself and live with the fact that nothing but his cowardice keeps him from suicide...

...The subtler methods of Madison Avenue and the cia will not bring it to us...

...Because spirit lives and resists, 1984 seems farther away now than it did 20 years ago...

...And of the crowd of non-participants who stood staring, sometimes gaping, along the line of march, not one laughed, not one failed to grasp the fact that something strong and real was happening in front of them...

...I was already wobbling before contact with war, hatred, death and love changed my direction altogether...

...But if enough of us want a new society we will have it...

...Fifty years of totalitarian indoctrination have not brought it any closer in Russia...

...God is alive...

...As I walked in the local memorial march on Sunday —I who have felt alienated all my thinking life, who have never felt inspired to vote in a Presidential election —I realized suddenly that I had never before been in a social gathering I felt part of...

...But here, in my small city, thousands of men black and white were walking on all sides of me, feeling what I felt, thinking what I thought...

...Walter Cronkite got the date wrong...

...As the poets have said for years, the whole system has got to change, the whole animating battery has got to be recharged...

...He lives in Belmar, New Jersey...

...Ralph Abernathy incanted to the crowds at Memphis, and to the world, like one of the mantras Hindu scriptures prescribe for this Kaliyuga, this age of noise and iron...

...Millions indifferent to religion paid profound attention to the unabashedly Judeo-Christian utterances of black preachers who had suddenly brought the homiletic old-fashioned truth to virile life through the silencing authority of their attempts to live by it, their readiness to die by it...

...voiced the same prophecy at the death of Christ: "This is the end for the poor visionary and his ideas...

...I have had the suspicion that a certain critical point has perhaps been reached, that this country may just possibly accomplish something never achieved so far by any country without revolution...

...Facts are inadequate, as they always are in deep experiences of love or pain...

...But thinking back now on a foolish remark by an intelligent man, I am disturbed: During a distracted interview near the coffin Floyd Mc-Kissick, director of the Congress for Racial Equality, declared, "Nonviolence as a philosophy is passe...

...Surprise is not what has kept me from forgetting his remark...

...No, it is for personal reasons that McKissick's remark, out of the hundreds, stayed with me...

...If he did he was wrong...

...All this is only possible...

...The vocal expression was, for the most part, amazingly eloquent...

...Signs of a turning season have been breaking out on all sides...

...God is alive...

...where to look for meaning, we have tried to make do with sophistication...

...those with eyes to see saw...

...A truth that goes beyond mere facts emerged in those dark April days...

...America may find the resources and the grace to renew itself, to burst out of the constrictions of its outgrown form and grow, like a developing nymph...

...Eric Sevareid's eyes were wet and blinking...

...Nonviolence cannot become passe because it is built into the human psyche, it is that instinct for love we can never totally repress...

...Floyd McKissick seemed distracted during the interview and may not have meant what he said...

...Caesar did not proclaim a day of mourning for Jesus, nor did the world stop to ponder his death...

...When I was a pimply 15 or so and wising up to the fact that success lay in acquiring sophistication, I added a trio of French words to my daily vocabulary: risque, blase, and passe...

...To try to convince anybody of this by marshalling facts and counterfacts would be futile and irrelevant...

...And, should this unheard-of thing occur, history will likely record the moment the balance shifted as precisely 7:05 p.m., April 4, 1968, the moment a black saint passed from flesh into legend...

...It was the word he used: passe...

...For over 20 years I have distrusted and disliked American culture more than I have loved it, and I have shrunk away from it in an effort to preserve a semblance of integrity...

...Nonviolence is no passing political tactic...

...What else had we been waiting to hear...

...To abandon nonviolence man will have to devolve into something less than he is—less than a being in whom, as Camus said, there is more to admire than despise...

...Such regeneration can come only to individuals, one by one...

...Beginning with a stiff-necked President's delayed but real surrender to the roar of sanity, triggering an immediate resurgence of faith in the democratic process, and ending with a funeral service in Alabama attended by the world, where millions wept for a "drum major" who had tried to teach them how to march to a nobler beat, it was as if the Paraclete had chosen this moment, at long last, to re-descend on our heads...

...Throughout history Mc-Kissick's counterparts have always made it...

...Certainly Rome knew nothing like this, the tremendous awareness and surge of concern among the people over the conditions of then-society...

...Lately, however, I have begun to feel some tenuous hope that I may not have to remain an alien my entire life...

...It had to be made...

...The news of the murder interrupted a TV program in which a well-dressed young man with a sniper's rifle was trying to kill an unarmed couple, and a commercial in which grown men and women were gathered together to sing a hymn of thanksgiving to instant chocolate cream pie...

...For once the professionals, the entertainers, politicians, and journalists dropped their masks and spoke with their faces of their private share in the public sorrow...

...The massive sigh of relief at Johnson's announcement, the massive groan of anguish at King's murder are proof plain that vast stores of good will and real values have survived all attempts to corrupt and asphyxiate them...

...In a sense, these three words epitomize the cultural ego whose breakdown we are now witnessing—risque, the obsession with sex and artificial thrills as a substitute for religious exaltation...

...Thus the adjective "sophisticated" has been turned into a compliment, even though the term literally means to be adroit at the superficial and the specious...

...Having lost our sense of what human life is about, of what we are doing here, not even knowing Robert Granat, author of The Important Thing, is completing a new novel...

...What less than God did we believe could cope with the enormity in which we live...

...They said it after Gandhi's death, and after each of his temporary setbacks...

...The lightning of those 10 days in April briefly illuminated human form and human destiny...

...In reaction to this culture there has been a growing minority of native-born aliens, of which I happen to be one...

...It was as if the force that put us here and keeps us here had taken a poll of our society, in the manner of Sodom, and had found, this time, for the moment, the required number of good men to make us worth saving...

...It is love become active...

...Doubtless some leader of the Zealots (who might he have been...

...Saint Joan Cracked for years, the dam finally gave way with the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., releasing an emotion of a kind never quite experienced before in this country...

...and passe, the morbid fear of being out of step with the fashionable and new...

...Yet 2,000 years later men still feel it necessary to proclaim and proclaim again that the poor visionary and his ideas are finished, passe, as if they had died only the other day...

...and "simple" or "natural" have become pejorative...

...What is certain is that, preceded by the political rumbling of the weeks before, the upheaval of those volcanic first 10 days in April has altered the topography of history...

...Though I personally came shooting into consciousness from a sophisticated background and an Ivy League catapult that had me aimed at "realistic" goals, I was poor material...

...blase, the sublimation of cynicism as a substitute wisdom for men who have "everything...

...God is alive...

...Not only the masses wept...

...But sophistication is based finally on a despairing view of man that sees in him something hopelessly perverse and despicable—the attitude one can see displayed nightly on the electronic tube...

...As long as it hurts to hate or be hated, to see children abused, to feel estranged from a lover or a friend, as long as human consciousness must marinate in the foreknowledge of death, men will remain in tension between the beasts and the angels, creatures for whom love is vital to existential identity...