No Kings

I was there in heart and spirit. It seems like every community held a gathering. I went online after I got home from work to see how things went in Minneapolis/St. Paul. It was a rally, a call for resistance=all the things you’d expect. But there was also a somber note, a reference to loss, saying names out loud.

A reminder of this past long, hard winter. Calling forth spring, hope, change.

When Tim Walz introduced Bruce Springsteen, he was dressed down in a flannel and wind ruffled his hair. He seemed so everyman. I know he’s taken a lot of grief these past few years after stepping into the political limelight. He’s taken a few punches. One has the feeling the job has worn him down.

Then, when Bruce Springsteen took the stage, you could hear the crowd, but it didn’t feel like a rock concert. I sensed anticipation, like when a priest comes out, someone to say the words and hold up the cup, to lay it all out on the altar. What we need to hear—whether good or bad, something to take us forward. I’m not sure what patriotism is—but I’ve felt it a couple of times. It’s unexpected, the opposite of pride, almost a humility, in awe of something greater than myself. Community, unity, all of us. I last felt it during the half time show at the Super Bowl in 2002 when U2 performed and there was a video montage about 9/11--another day that will live in infamy. And, I was reminded that all those people who died were just doing their job(s), going to work, doing what was necessary, needed, and they lost their lives. I could care less about football, the Super Bowl and most sports, but the overwhelming emotions that welled up inside of me during the show caused me to run out of the room. I had to compose myself.

Same. There was a catch in my throat watching the video of Springsteen on the steps of the capitol. Folks were just dropping off kids at school, driving to their jobs, the store, stepping out for coffee and were caught, killed, assaulted. Through the music, the lyrics we’re brought together, into consciousness, awakened. Much like the ultimate scene in Hamnet where the wife of Shakespeare, the grieving mother works through a series of difficult emotions to finally accept her son’s death, own her grief, acknowledge her husband and his sorrow, understand the broader world, how her life has expanded and also contracted, that there is something much greater at play, almost god-like, definitely spiritual—and that art has brought her into this moment, to a fulcrum point of realization. Whereupon, afterwards, there is only an after.

We are all living in an age of lost innocence. Witnesses to a crumbling—but also of a phoenix rising. An after before the before. What comes next.