It's easy to get swept up in a moment. We went from stalled, to moving, to nervous, to fired up, to jubilant, and yes, almost even to the brink of complacent. Too much time smiling, not enough time staring one, simple truth in the face:
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation…want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
The thing I take away tonight is that there was only one lightning strike, so far. It was bright. It was beautiful. It made us look up again, for the first time in years, and wonder at the sky. But we also can't forget about the ground.
There was a book I had when I was a kid, "Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain." The farmer watches the cloud build over his dry land, standing on one leg, leaning on a spear. The cloud builds, but it won't break. He sees the lightning. But the cloud is impotent. It won't break. Not till he throws the spear into it. Then the rain falls.
We've spent these long years watching the world around us grow darker. We slowly slumped, our heads watching only our feet as we shuffled. We needed the lightning of Iowa to make us look to the sky again. But in the end, lightning only lights the dark so we can see how thirsty the land is. It breaks the shadow so we can see cracked earth, the dry crops, the dessicated trees. But in the lightning we see only a heap of broken images. The cloud never lifts until the rain comes. Until the cloud breaks, we'll never see the sun. In the lightning, we see flashes. And when the lightning fades, if we were watching, we know what we didn't know before. We don't need lightning, we need rain.
10 minutes after Barack left the stage tonight, I had fielded 7 calls. People calling to tell us to keep our chins up. People I've been chasing for weeks without success, now asking if they can come to volunteer tomorrow. One woman called. She was in a wheelchair, she told me, but she could sit on a corner and hold a sign. She could make phone calls, if there was a ramp to get into the office. She said to me, "I was undecided between Obama and Hillary, but that speech just made up my mind. What he said, you know. Even though he lost? That sealed it for me."
It's been awfully dark lately. Too dark to look at anything but the ground, for fear of stumbling in the shadow. The lightning last Thursday made us look up. We saw the cloud building, we saw the possibility of rain, our throats burned suddenly, and we watched the shadows, remembering the light. Tonight, a dry wind blew across our open lips, parching our tongues. Tonight, we looked again and saw not what was waiting, but what is. We saw power scratch. We saw power bite, claw, kick, cry and scream. And power has a way of holding things back. Power has a way of keeping us in our place, of telling us that we're better off keeping dreams hidden, our heads down. But we also tasted a raindrop. At least those of us on the ground, here in the real, true, non-metaphor desert in Nevada tasted it.
Have you smelled rain in the desert? There's nothing like it. The first drops taste like dust. But if it keeps falling, it washes everything clean. It pushes the dust down. It makes the grass stand. And in the night, after the rain, the crickets sing.
One of the students sent me a text message, at 7:59, local time. It said:
"It's not over yet! But I promise to work as hard as possible to change our future!"
It's starting to rain, in the desert, but it's not enough yet. Power concedes nothing without a demand. The demand now is that we risk what we've settled for to gain what we dream of. This is our chance. So keep your hand steady and your eye fixed. Grip your spear. Aim for the cloud. Throw.
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