So, You Say You Want A Revolution
Sometimes, revolution is a quiet sound. As subtle as the jutting of a jaw or the planting of feet. As soft as an explosion in the soul.
Remember the bus? Ordinary bus under an ordinary twilight in an ordinary town? Remember the white man who got on and the black woman who refused to get up? Remember what she said?
No.
Sometimes, revolution is a single word.
Marcel Thornton said it just the other day. A 29-year-old disc jockey from station WERQ-FM in Baltimore, he went to the march of a million men, listened to the cry for personal responsibility, returned to work and said no. No more songs about girls with their legs in the air and boys “hard as a roll of quarters.” No more tunes about drug-fueled joys and the romance of violent death. No.
It will not surprise you to hear that Marcel Thornton no longer has a job.
Sometimes, revolution requires sacrifice.
The question is, what are you willing to sacrifice for? Where will you draw the line? It’s a very personal thing, choosing the point at which revolution becomes necessary. And rightly so. Revolution is dangerous business.
And revolution catches fire sometimes.
It happened 40 years ago on that bus. Ordinary bus under an ordinary twilight in an ordinary town, it gave rise to an extraordinary movement of marchers and martyrs that transfigured the nation and inspired the world.
Yes, revolution fizzles sometimes, too.
Maybe that’s what will happen with Marcel Thornton. Maybe he’ll reconsider, maybe his employer will have a change of heart, or maybe he’ll just sink from public view like a pebble in an ocean - forgotten harbinger of a change that was never made.
But thank him anyway, because he’s done us a good deed here. He’s reminded us of the nature of revolution.
Lord knows we needed it.
Often someone faces a deplorable condition and asks, “What can I do?” It comes with a shrugging of shoulders and a lifting of brows as if to emphasize, I am ordinary, I am solitary, I am only me. Change is not within my power.
You sense in it not just helplessness, but deferral. Give me someone larger than me, it says, a lightning bolt of a person, and then I will help make revolution.
Of course, revolution does not recruit giants or lightning bolts - it makes them. Some of us have forgotten that. Small wonder.
The Greed Decade and the Information Age have bequeathed us mass anonymity and caused us to forget our own power. We have become taillights in a traffic jam, faces in a shopping mall, citizens of the “virtual” community. We cocoon on the couch with a pint of Haagen Dazs and some rentals from Blockbuster - small in the presence of multinational Goliaths, shadowed in the klieg lights of the stars. And we wonder, some of us, if anybody else is out there and if so, do they feel the way we do?
Isolated.
And more, deeply apprehensive about the state of this union: children dying at children’s hands, sick cruelty rising in our communities and culture like bile in the throat, Washington playing cynical games of divide and conquer and, most of all, like Dorothy stranded on the road to Oz, the rest of us, lost in a quagmire of “family values” cliches, trying to find our way back to simple decency.
“Give us Perot!” we cry. “Give us Powell!” Give us a leader, a lightning bolt, someone who will make revolution.
But revolution is both simpler and more complex than that.
An ordinary woman on an ordinary bus refused to assent to a system that said she was secondary and so forced a mighty nation to own up to its highest principles and reconsider what it means to be free.
Now an ordinary DJ at an ordinary radio station refuses to assent to music that debases humankind. Maybe some of those who make the music will finally ask themselves why - and, perhaps, exercise some personal responsibility of their own.
Sometimes, revolution is a single word.
Sometimes, revolution is in our grasp and we don’t even know it.
xxxx