Democracy Is Hiring! You’d Be Perfect
I knew a woman who didn’t like lemonade much. But she wouldn’t - she couldn’t - drive by a lemonade stand without stopping.
She’d buy a few wax cups, usually Country Time Lemonade or Minute Made Lemonade from concentrate, and glug it down enthusiastically. BEST I’ve ever had! she’d declare to the delighted young lemonade sellers.
“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts,” wrote George Eliot.
A man I know keeps a few $5 bills by the mudroom door. Whenever he leaves the house, he tucks a fiver in his pocket and vows to return without it. It belongs to someone else.
And so he will drop it in a tip jar, give it to someone asking for spare change, find a way to pass it into someone else’s hands.
"We do not ask to see the distant scene. One step is enough for us today,” wrote theologian John Henry Newman.
Once, as my mother and I were leaving a wedding, tired and ready for the hotel’s soft pillows, we happened to look behind us. There, on an otherwise empty dance floor, was an older woman dancing a shy muted dance.
My mother spun around, shot out to that woman, and started to twist and shout, shimmy and stomp.
And you’d have thought someone had just plucked the sun and all its rays out of the sky and stuck them straight into the woman’s heart. She threw open her arms, beamed a big jubilant beam, and started dancing the dance that had been pent up inside her.
“Make visible what, perhaps without you, might never be seen,” wrote photographer Robert Henri.
Democracy is understaffed. And it’s hiring a wide range of positions.
It needs protestors, and candidates for the public library board. It needs visionaries who imagine what could be, artists who depict it, and caretakers who love and nurture the generation inheriting it.
It needs canvassers for ballot referenda and poets who inspire us to believe in a future we cannot yet see.
And it needs those untold millions who quietly, and with little acclaim, point us towards the world we want to live in by holding doors and helping with luggage in the overhead compartment.
Giving blood and stopping at crosswalks for pedestrians. Who text out of the blue to say, “I’m thinking of you!” (as my friend Dan says, It is so lovely to be thought of) and take grape jelly to the food pantry.
“Do your little bit of good where you are,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu would say. “It’s those little bits of good strung together that overwhelm the world.”
After all, democracy is both a form of governance, and a culture. A culture that we are all co-authoring each day.
There were actually two addresses given at Gettysburg. The short, famous one by the man in the stovepipe hat that rang out with the last line, “...That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Then there was a much less famous, much longer address by author and minister Edward Everett Hale. The speech is understandably more muted in history. But Hale shone bright in other writings, including this one that is a fitting pair to the democracy President Lincoln spoke of:
"I am only one, but still I am one,” wrote Hale. "I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do."
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