Soaring Like a Bird by Charles Bane, Jr.

Soaring Like a Birdby Charles Bane, Jr. | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Forces among the American people are gathering like merging clouds to resist the presidency of Donald Trump, and their objects are large: to prevent a downslide into everything that is cancerous to a democracy, to carry goodness uphill and store up time and small achievements that will grow greater when Trump no longer holds levers of awesome and frightening power.
Trump is not a deep reader, and never an activist. Like all men of brutish will, he is ultimately an enigma and it's likely his thin skin is going to build to tragedy. History is already beginning to sketch him out and tweets can't stop its pen.
What I'm writing comes from experience. Schooled by Saul Alinsky, I know that victory comes to the activist in disappointing sizes that seem—at first—unacceptable  and only later are a comfort, like a memento stored under socks in a drawer.
This is what I want to add, unconventionally, to all the words that will pour from the marginalized during the next four years: study philosophy.
This is not eccentricity. The civil rights movement I was part of produced, at moments of threat, what icon Andrew Young called " freedom high": a feeling of kinship with a cause so intense that  the struggle became transcendent and all sense of danger passed ( In the 1990's I was under a death threat from local drug dealers who did not want my initiative of a drug court to succeed, funneling young Black males in our county who were first-time offenders away from prison and into community service, that would disrupt their business and way of life. We were living in a small house in West Palm Beach, Florida and when the newspaper was delivered each morning and thrown against the side of the house, my lovely wife would jump, fearful of a gunshot. I never experienced more serenity).
Over the next four years, protesters will organize, march, confront and face arrest. In place of freedom high, they of permanent resistance need cloud--level height from which to soar, as solace, reward and perspective that is personal.
No matter what you may have been taught, philosophy is the marker line between the pack and you as a thinking soul. It was philosophy that replaced myth with a  deeper quest for truth. When the police cars vanish, what is your purpose? What acts between yourself and others will foster the connection you crave and give you peace, now and when the day is won?
Read the philosophers, each one and you will never feel—at your most oppressed—an exile.
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Charles Bane, Jr. is the American author of three collections of poetry including the recent  The Ends Of The Earth: Collected Poems (Transcendent Zero Press, 2015) and The Ascent Of Feminist Poetry, as well as I Meet Geronimo And Other Stories (Avignon Press, 2015) and  Three Seasons: Writing Donald Hall (Collection of the Houghton Library, Harvard University). Bane  created and contributes to The Meaning Of Poetry Series for The Gutenberg Project.http://charlesbanejr.co