Charlie Pierce, just now, reacting to Justice Ginsberg's dissent from the Supreme Court decision upholding North Carolina's restrictive voting laws:
There is a long, blue river of sadness running through the words of that dissent. It runs under the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama. It pools into a lagoon of sadness behind an earthen dam in Mississippi. The survivors of the generation that fought and bled for the right to vote are getting old and dying off right now. John Lewis is 74. Soon, there won't be any of them left. But it always was thought that the victories they won would survive them. That the real monument to their cause would be lines of the historically disenfranchised suddenly empowered, swamping the system, and realizing that elections in this country are meant to be the most powerful form of civil disobedience there is. And now, it looks very much as though powerful interests are in combination to make sure their victories die with them, here as we celebrate John Roberts's Day of Jubilee. There is a long blue river of sadness running through those words, and a darkness spreading across its surface, and a long night is falling on the face of the water.
Pierce is a prolific, wondrous writer, every day producing 6 or 7 hilarious, biting, and astute pieces on Esquire's politics blog. His growing list of not-so-affectionate nicknames ("Zombie-eyed granny starver" Paul Ryan) alone is worth the click for admission to the blog.
But sometimes his prose ascends into poetry, as the quote above does.
Of all of the offenses to democracy committed by the right, voting restrictions are the saddest and most difficult to accept. Those of us who lived through the sixties and participated in or just witnessed the Civil Rights struggles believed that Martin Luther King was right; that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." We thought that parts of that arc of justice, including voting rights, had been achieved. We didn't think we'd go backward from what was accomplished.
We still think Dr. King was right -- that there will be justice. People like Reverend Barber and Moral Mondays give us hope, even in the face of these unanticipated bumps in the road. And we're thankful to Charlie Pierce, who can transcend the cynicism with his writing.