Voting Rights, Democracy, Hope, Optimism, and the "Arc of the Moral Universe"

Since You Asked: Uncommon Advice from Cary Tennis

Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia said this Friday about the fight for voting rights:

"Hope is a little different from optimism. Hope is the recognition that, yeah, we are in a serious fight for what is good, what is true, what is righteous, and evil is well financed and determined. I understand that. But you know, as bad as this bill is, and it's terrible, it would be worse if it were not for the fact that people stood up, and made noise about it. So I don't want people to underestimate the power of their own voice."

And this: "A change that we don't think is possible, when it happens it almost feels like all of a sudden, but it wasn't all of a sudden at all. Dr. King used to say that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. It's our job to keep bending the arc."

And this: "I believe in democracy. I believe that democracy is, as I said a couple of weeks ago, the political enactment of a spiritual idea, this noble and amazing idea that all of us have within us a spark of the divine, the imago Dei, some sense of the image of God, and that therefore we ought to have a voice in the direction of the country and our destiny within it."

And here are a few things I said:

"While misfortune is random, so is the occasional gift; so is the occasional turnaround. And we're not in control of either one."

I also say this: "Hope and optimism fuel action. Despair fuels depression and giving up. ... It's incumbent upon us to feel hope, because hope springs from the observed world. It is a component of the world."

And then, around the 29:20 minute mark, I start playing the blues on my Takamine parlor-style guitar and I don't stop for nine minutes. So if you get bored of me talking you can skip right to the blues or, if like my friend Larry Rubin, you don't care one iota about the blues, you can skip the musical interlude entirely the minute I stop talking. Ciao!

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