Celebrating the idea of America when the reality falls short
Why attend a July 4th parade when democracy is under attack? Because giving up is not an option.
Why attend a July 4th parade when democracy is under attack? Because giving up is not an option.
The only surprising thing about Mike Lee’s statement saying democracy isn’t the objective is that he said the quiet part out loud.
St. Alban’s Parish was blessed this morning with the presence and witness of Ruby Sales, a civil rights activist whose life was saved 50 years ago by the actions of Jonathan Daniels. Michael Ruane, writing in the Washington Post, explains: By all rights, Ruby Sales should have been killed on Friday, Aug. 20, 1965. She should have been hit by the shotgun blast fired by the enraged white man on the porch of the general store in rural Alabama. Her life should have ended at 17, an African American college student and civil rights worker, gunned down under a Coca-Cola sign in the fight for freedom and justice. But there she was Sunday morning, age 67, in St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Northwest Washington, given a half-century of life by a white seminarian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels who pushed her aside and died in her place. She sat in an ornate wooden chair in the chancel of the church, the decades having taken a toll on her eyesight and her knees, and called herself “a remnant” …