I’ve spent nearly five decades encouraging citizens to move from debilitating despair to engaged activism. During all of this time, whenever I needed a break or a little inspiration, I turned to music, something I think more and more of us need these days. So it was a special treat to rediscover “Show the Way,” a song by folk singer David Wilcox and a particular gift to this moment. It begins:
“You say you see no hope.
You say you see no reason we should dream
that the world would ever change.
You say that love is foolish to believe
‘cause there'll always be some crazy
with an army or a knife
to wake you from your daydream,
put the fear back in your life”
Too many of us see no hope and feel the fear creeping back into our lives.
I heard warnings of that fear and hopelessness at the 2024 Miami Book Fair. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni spoke about his book “The Age of Grievance” and his concern about “our nation’s change from a fundamental optimism to a fundamental pessimism” and bemoaned “our love of simple answers that absolve us of any responsibility.”
Eddie Glaude Jr. — Princeton professor, MSNBC panelist and author of “We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For” — warned that President-election Donald Trump “gives a permission structure for folks to hate and blame others for their condition.” Journalist and author of “We Are Home” Ray Suarez cautioned that “President-elect Trump is offering recycled hatred from the earliest time in our country” and worried that “threats are so huge that we’ll make room for cruelty.”
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But along with the authors’ deep concern were their calls to forge a better way. Bruni encouraged “civil discussion” and cited “the need to find common ground and seek compromise.” Glaude said that “for democracy to work we must become better people.” And Suarez’s own podcast, “On Shifting Ground,” aims to “give us hope for human resilience.”
In “Show the Way,” the songwriter’s relief from the bleakness comes in the chorus and points to the grounding that all great spiritual and political leaders offer:
“Look, if someone wrote a play
just to glorify what's stronger than hate
would they not arrange the stage
to look as if the hero came too late?
He's almost in defeat,
it's looking like the evil side will win
so on the edge of every seat
from the moment that the whole thing begins.
It is love who mixed the mortar
and it's love who stacked these stones
and it's love who made the stage here
although it looks like we're alone
in this scene, set in shadows,
like the night is here to stay
there is evil cast around us
but it's love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love can show the way”
Wasn’t the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. saying, “It’s love that wrote the play” when, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he said, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality”?
And didn’t King offer further clarity on what each of us can do to contribute to this ultimate reality when he said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that”?
But this leaves us with the question, “How?”
Organizations that work to deliver transformational advocacy lead with love and train us to reach across the aisle. They 1) start with bringing people together and forming them into local chapters so we’re not working alone, 2) train us to become effective activists and 3) encourage us to have breakthroughs, to do things as activists we never thought we could do. They treat us as the powerful people that we are.
But most nonprofits don’t even take the first step. They fail at starting new chapters, or they avoid the challenge altogether, because they see their members as incapable and not really committed.
I find former Citizens’ Climate Lobby Executive Director Mark Reynolds’ approach to starting a chapter to be particularly inspiring:
“Before I go to a city to start a CCL Chapter, I decide that I am going to fall in love with them before I get there. So, when I arrive, I try to find evidence in them and in the environment about why I will never be the same from having spent time with them.”
There will be a lot of challenging and exciting work in the next few years. That makes it all the more important to find an organization that understands and operates from the realization that “In this darkness love will show the way.”
Daley-Harris is the author of “Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy” and the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage. This is part of a series focused on better understanding transformational advocacy: citizens awakening to their power.
