Fearless

I never claimed to be fearless. If you read The Sky Behind Me , what you may come away with is a story of a man who knew his limits, and didn’t push the river as some say. I don’t feel particularly brave or courageous. But I do know this. Fear is truly the great limiter of human endeavor. The worn out cliche’ is that boats weren’t designed and built to stay in the harbor, and neither were we. It’s one of the reasons I’ve taken a stand for equal rights for everyone in this country. As a nation, we were crafted as a response to fear: fear of attempting to move past old, mythic sensibilities; fear to oppose ancient institutions; fear to confront longstanding superstitions and myths from our recent European ancestry.
The new American narrative we created put fear aside, replacing that most ancient of emotions with something brand new in man’s history, the radical concept that we’re in command of our own destiny, and that each person is free to make of that destiny what they will. No more royal prerogatives. No more familial or nepotistic claims to success and elevation. No more paternalistic supervision of men’s lives.
Watching the crowd in front of the Supreme Court of the United States Tuesday morning I was struck by two things: the civility of the opposing participants in the marriage equality confrontation; and the shared passion that their argument would win the day. But something else stood out that brisk, early spring morning as I watched people milling around in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol dome. The day before, in Paris, even larger crowds had gathered for the same purpose, in a clash over equal marriage rights. It was history happening in the present, and history transported more than two hundred years. Our revolution was not without bloodshed, far from it. But its resolution has been marked for the most part by peaceful if passionate social conflict. The French revolution on the other hand was declaimed as a bloody, drawn out affair, with repercussions lasting almost to the present, exemplified by the scene in Paris last week. The difference is fear. Fear that any resolution is of necessity a zero sum event, that compromise is never to be had. Fear that our gain must mean the others’ utter defeat. Fear that we Americans have somehow managed to put aside.
Watching my fellow citizens in Washington I saw something else Tuesday morning. I saw hope, not fear.