Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir and The President

Through blood drawn by lash, and blood drawn by sword, we noted that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half slave, and half free.

--President Barack Obama, 2nd Inaugural Address

How do you answer the Rush Limbaugh's, the Mitch McConnell's, the Wayne La Pierre's of the world, who speak with hate dripping from their lips?

I know now.

You bring up the 2013 Inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama on Youtube and you pause it on the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, and you take your hat off and get on your feet and then hit the play button and watch and listen, as they sing the same song Abraham Lincoln listened to, often, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  Oh, I know, it's got religion. It's got "As Christ died to make men holy, we die to make men free," but that doesn't bother the Phantom, who has only rarely set foot in a church. This is our secular High Holy Day, and it only happens once every 4 years, and the BTC sanctified it correctly.

What was particularly inspiring, beyond the variety of faces from White to Black, Male to Female was the electrifying performance of the soloist, a young woman I did not know, never seen before, just a citizen with a voice coming from deep down from some wellspring of pride and passion and joy and carrying out over that huge crowd, sweeping from the Capitol building, across the reflecting pool, with its statue of Ulysses S. Grant, in his slouch hat on a horse, looking like he's riding through a rainstorm, bringing freedom to millions of enslaved souls, and down the mall, toward the Washington Monument, rising on a line with the Capitol's portico and beyond that, invisible but present all the same, another reflecting pool running up to the man seated behind the white marble columns, listening, as he listened 50 years earlier to a minister from the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, cry out that he longed for the day when his little children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, and he ended his call for freedom with words from an  old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at Last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

And back on the portico, our 45th President invoked the words of a slave owner, Thomas Jefferson, but then he used the words of our greatest President, although I'm not sure how many caught the reference.  In his 1865 address that President wondered aloud why the great calamity of the Civil War had been brought forth upon the nation. Why had so many died, so much destruction and suffering been visited upon the nation? 

Whenever you get the why question, you can listen for a reference to forces beyond human control. And Lincoln, (like Jefferson) who had little truck with organized religion, speculated perhaps this great suffering was the price paid for slavery, perhaps every drop of blood drawn by the bondman's lash had to be paid for in blood drawn by the sword.  Oh, he invoked a vengeful God, but I bet there were plenty of heads nodding in that crowd in 1865.  And of all the lines Mr. Obama could have echoed, he chose these.

His first Inaugural Address, four years ago was a disappointment because he was still in his conciliatory mode. But this time, he came out swinging.

We can only hope he has time to lead us forward.
Glory hallelujah!