Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
“The revolution is not being televised.”
The words, drawn 18 inches high in brightly colored chalk, were splayed out across the sidewalk on the south side of the Indiana Statehouse, a remnant from a recent protest and a nod to the 1971 Gil Scott-Heron spoken-word song that’s become a rallying cry for generations to get up, get out and get involved.
Seeing them made me think about the residents in and around Franklin Township who have fought for months against a plan to build a data center in their backyard because they fear what will happen to their property values, energy costs and water supply.
It made me think of the frustrated students across the city who recently walked out of their high schools to gather downtown for a protest against gun violence in the wake of yet another school shooting.
It made me think of the peace vigil protesting nuclear weapons and war that’s existed outside the White House for almost as long as I’ve been alive. Officials partially removed the display, classifying it as a shelter during a cleanup of nearby homeless camps.
And that made me think of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which King reminds us that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Protests and vigils are nothing new. They are evidence of a democratic impulse as old as America itself. They echo fundamentals we sometimes forget—civic virtue and the common good—and remind us of the social contract under which we agree to be governed.
My eighth-grader, studying under incredible history and English teachers, is exploring these concepts for the first time. Watching a young person begin to understand where the rights we have today came from—and why they’re worth fighting for—is like watching the petals of a flower slowly open toward the sun.
Now more than ever, we must look to history to ground ourselves in who we are. It’s easy for grown-ups to grow cynical, convinced that power is too entrenched and nothing will ever change. But slavery once was legal. Women lacked the right to vote. Same-sex couples were denied the right to marry. Workers toiled in unsafe conditions.
As King wrote while jailed, “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’”
Our roots of self-government run deep and rarely grow in a straight line.
The next generation is learning these lessons in school. We must keep practicing them at home if we want our government to reflect and respect the will of the governed.
Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel put it this way: “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
Which brings me back to those sidewalk-chalked words at the Statehouse.
The revolution will not be televised. It is not a single moment in time or act of protest. It is our ongoing choice to embrace democracy, to rise up again and again in the face of adversity, to build and rebuild—steadier with each try—a world we want to live in.•
__________
Chartier is a lifelong Indianapolis resident and owner of Mass Ave Public Relations. Send comments to [email protected].
Click here for more Forefront columns.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.
