The Battle of Guilford Courthouse & Barack Hussein Obama

For a minute, I have to get American on all y’all.

For- what has been for me, one heart-stopping and week-long minute.

I woke up Tuesday morning to my mother on the phone, tearful, overjoyed:

Mom: "Amanda, we did it. I just keep thinking…it worked, we did it. All of that work."

The night before on the phone, my father, choked up:

Dad: "When I see the shots of the crowd, of the people’s faces, I feel such…"

Me: "Joy?"

Dad: "Relief."

I was with my Dad on Election Night, the minute the results were called:

"President-Elect Barack Obama."

I discovered that I had physically stood up without realizing it in shock. I stared at the screen and read and re-read the words:

"President-Elect Barack Obama."

I unexpectedly started to cry. So did my Dad. A wound older than either of us in every American psyche found an unexpected modicum of relief.

I was also with my Dad on October 7, 2001. The day the United States invaded Afghanistan and George W. Bush spoke the following words:

"Today we focus on Afghanistan, but the battle is broader. Every nation has a
choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral ground. If any government
sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and
murderers, themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril."

I wept watching the bombs fall, listening to the justification that we were killing them because they hated freedom. I stared at the television like a zombie for hours, scaring my family, and watched George W. Bush lay the semiotic foundation of his (oil driven) Americo-Religious Crusude against the Middle East. The next morning I got lost on my way to work. I didn’t know where I was. I eventually just went home, wept again, and waited for worse. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had hijacked my country and crashed it into an abyss. They said to us:

"America will never relent on this war against terror. There will be times of
swift, dramatic action. There will be times of steady, quiet progress. Over
time, with patience, and precision, the terrorists will be pursued. They will be
isolated, surrounded, cornered, until there is no place to run, or hide, or
rest."

No place. To run, or hide. Or rest.

I prayed in Arabic then. And English. In Farsi. I believed in God then. In Allah.

I began to write a play. The first image on paper: George W. Bush as puppeteer, channeling his idea of God into a Wayang Golek demon puppet painted to resemble Uncle Sam. My country, ‘tis of thee. Sweet land of hegemony. Of thee I dreamed.

Last Tuesday morning- Tuesday, January 20, 2009, I took the subway to downtown Chicago to catch the express bus down to Hyde Park. I was excited to watch the Inauguration on TV with an old friend I had done anti-racism work with in Florida. I hadn’t seen him since high school. Because of how the mostly white International Baccalaureate program was managed at our mostly black high school, we experienced almost total racial segregation. In addition to separate academic tracks, we had separate physical education classes and busing. This was in 1995, not 1955. The "black" school got the cast off books and supplies from the prioritized "white" school. We decided to do something about it. If the school wasn’t going to provide us with opportunities to find common ground, we would create it ourselves. This was no small thing. My high school was in Gainesville, about an hour and a half’s drive from Rosewood, Florida. In this very month of January in 1923, white mobs burned down the entire town of Rosewood- lynching, beating, torturing, shooting, and murdering an unknown number of it’s black residents and terrorizing the remainder into hiding in the swamps. Lexie Gordon had hidden underneath her house, but after the mob set it on fire, she tried to escape. They shot her dead when she tried to run away. This has always reminded me of Sandi Smith, a black woman, a nurse and Civil Rights activist, who was shot between the eyes by a Klansman when she peeked out from her hiding place in Morningside Heights during the Greensboro Massacre. The Greensboro Massacre was during my lifetime, in 1979. 56 years after Lexie Gordon, in the North Carolina university town where I was born. She, and four other Civil Rights demonstrators were killed. Ten others were badly wounded. My family was in the process of moving from the house where we had lived when I was born, which was about 8 miles from where the Klan and Neo-Nazis opened fire on demonstrators in the middle of a public street, into our new house across town. When I look at the news footage of that attack, I am struck by how ordinary it was right up until the actual killing began. It looked just like every demonstration my parents brought me to growing up. In the beginning of the news footage, they were singing hymns:

"Just like a tree, planted by the water….
We shall not be moved."

We went to a million demonstrations like this throughout my childhood. Greensboro had been a center of the textile industry since the development of the cotton trade and rail system, and black workers who had once been enslaved under that system continued to be exploited and suffer under racist labor conditions. The 1979 demonstration was against unfair labor conditions and the terrorism black workers suffered from the Klu Klux Klan. If you know my mother, you know that it would be out of character for her to miss an opportunity like that to support what people were doing to speak out against racism. But we weren’t there. I can think of a hundred other days when we were there, when she had me on her hip, chewing on her key chain and pulling her hair, while she talked about desegregating the human heart to whoever would listen. My mother, just like a tree, planted by the water. She shall not be moved. My mother who told me bedtime stories about Klansmen breaking into their integrated Bahá’í Unity Feasts in Frogmore, South Carolina with sawed off shotguns- pointing them at the head of a 15 year old African-American boy standing at the door:

"I don’t know what you Bahá’í nigger lovers are talking about! I could never love you!"

And his response:

"But, I could love you."

My mother. Bedtime stories that a month and a half earlier Enoch Olinga had been assassinated in his back yard with his wife and children. My mother, singing One Heart, Ruby Red to me every day after prayers and breakfast. Teaching me how to handle the Klan when they showed up at our rallies. You just smile at them, and look the other way.

How lady-like. How euphorically, and effectively Southern. Flash them a sincerely loving smile, and keep marching. Keep chanting: "We. Shall. Overcome…"

Love the hate out of those people. (Plus, it drives them crazy.)

"…Someday."

But she couldn’t go to that protest on November 3, 1979. She was unpacking my crib in our new house.

"On November 3, 1979, at the corner of Carver and Everitt Streets, black and
white demonstrators gather to march through Greensboro, North Carolina, a legal
demonstration against the Ku Klux Klan. A caravan of Klansmen and Nazis pull up
to the protesters and open fire…Eighty-eight seconds later, five demonstrators
lie dead and ten others wounded from the gunfire, recorded on camera by four TV
stations. Four women have lost their husbands, three children have lost their
fathers…After two criminal trials, not a single gunman has spent a day in
prison, although a civil trial won an unprecedented victory for the victims: For
one of the only times in US history, a jury held local police liable for
cooperating with Ku Klux Klan in a wrongful death."

Sally Bermanzohn, Through Survivors' Eyes: From the Sixties to the Greensboro Massacre

The next day, November 4, 1979, 52 American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran. My city, my Bahá’í community, and my family became the sites of multiple, intersecting revolutions.

My city wasn’t new to revolution. In March of 1781, British troops defeated 4,400 revolutionary men fighting under American Commander Nathanael Greene at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. The Americans lost the battle. But, in losing this decisive battle, we seem to have won the Revolutionary War. The loss at Guilford Courthouse was announced in Philadelphia as: "GOOD NEWS FROM THE SOUTH." The strategy was to wear the British down:

"We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again."

It worked. It would be seven months until British General Cornwallis surrendered, but the loss in Greensboro was decisive in winning the Revolution. You have to be willing to fight and lose if you are really fighting to ultimately win. The same strategy worked in Greensboro again in 1960, and had just as dramatic an impact. But this time, it was the miracle of non-violent Revolution. On February 1, 1960, Jibreel Khazan (Ezell Blair Jr), Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeill, and David Richmond took seats at the segregated lunch counter at the Woolworth’s on Elm Street. The "Greensboro Four" were freshman at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College. Franklin McCain has described the feeling that overwhelmed him as he sat down on the stool at the lunch counter as "liberation, restored manhood…I truly felt almost invincible." He goes on:

"It's a feeling that I don't think that I'll ever be able to have again. It's
the kind of thing that people pray for … and wish for all their lives and
never
experience it. And I felt as though I wouldn't have been cheated out
of life had
that been the end of my life at that second or that moment."

Freedom. "oh, freedom over me."

"Freedom is not a matter of place.
It is a condition…
To me prison is
freedom…
When one is released from the prison of self, that is indeed
release, for that is the greater prison. When this release takes place, then one
cannot be outwardly imprisoned.
When they put my feet in stocks, I would say
to the guard, ‘You cannot imprison me…’
Release comes by making of the will
a Door through which the confirmations of the Spirit come..."
‘Abdu’l-Bahá in
London, p. 120

And before I'd be a slave I'll be buried in my grave And go home to my Lord and be free.

The next day more students joined them. The third day, there were 300 students at that lunch counter. The next day, 1000. Within 2 months sit-ins had arisen in 54 cities across 9 states. Six years after Mandela was released from prison, the South African Ambassador received an award in his honor at the Greensboro Woolworth’s. He explained that during the worst of it under apartheid, the writings of Dr. King had been banned in South Africa:

"The information we got was part of the underground, and we lived through the
experiences of the (U.S.) civil rights movement. When the time came, we took
over the same methods as the sit-ins and civil disobedience."

Greensboro was not the first sit-in. India, Chicago, St Louis, Baltimore, Oklahoma City, and Durham had all gone first. But it was decisive. Empowerment seems to come in increments. We assert it more and more. But once you take your power back, it is yours. And you are the only arbiter of it’s use.

My father spent three months of 1969 in a five by ten foot cell- in solitary confinement- in the Disciplinary Barracks, Drawer A, of Fort Leavenworth Kansas. Leavenworth is the only maximum security prison in the Department of Defense. My father was there for refusing to follow any order he felt would further the war in Vietnam. He spent a total of 22 months in U.S. Army lock-up, 18 of them at Leavenworth. The two courts-martial that had gotten him into Leavenworth were for refusal to salute his officers. The third court-martial, inside Leavenworth, was for refusal to report to military training. He was placed in solitary confinement because he refused to report for work detail in protest of his treatment as a political prisoner. This type of refusal to submit to authority is the undoing of the military model. Orders only have power if you agree to follow them. My father would not agree to follow them. It is painful for me to imagine my father, a nineteen year old boy, standing within the machinery of the most powerful military on earth and saying "No" again and again to his commanding officers and guards. But he did. Over and over again. At a very great cost. He could have run away, but he didn’t. Every 30 days he was brought before the disciplinary board. Every 30 days he refused to break. For 14 days he would be allowed a pencil and paper, and a solitary cell with a toilet. He refers to this as the "good chow" side. Then, after two weeks, he would be transferred to a cell with no toilet, with only a hole in the floor. He was allowed nothing, no pencil, no paper. There was a wooden platform on the floor and at night the guard would bring in a thin mattress and blanket, to be removed at sunup the next day. My father was alone. Though there was a growing Peace Movement outside the walls of the prison, he was alone inside that cell. "Making of his will a Door." The confirmations of Spirit would be a long time coming.

My Dad recently showed me a newsletter he had come across online that listed him as a prisoner of conscience. His name was among a list of Leavenworth prisoners in 1970. Peace organizations were attempting to mail these men Christmas cards so they wouldn’t feel so alone. My father had never been visited in jail by his family. He did not receive a Peace Movement Christmas card, because he was released on Christmas Eve, 1969. Looking at the other names of the Leavenworth prisoners, I asked him if he remembered them. He said no. He didn’t know any of them. The Anti-War movement which eventually rose up within the ranks of the United States military had not yet risen up when my Dad went to jail. He had been one of a literal handful of men who had begun it. In that, he was also alone by being among the first. But, over time, over 500, 000 U.S. soldiers would refuse to kill Vietnamese men, women, and children, and refuse to kill themselves, by deserting the U.S. Armed Forces. Very few took the road my father did- to throw his body, his mind, and his will into the gears of the United States war machine- to confront it directly from the inside out using non-violent direct action- to make it stop. But, it did stop. It nearly killed him in the doing. But, it did stop. Not nearly soon enough. This is what my father has written about that time and it’s aftermath:

"Montana was the turning point, the place where I came to the knowledge of
what I had to do. Today, I see that it was not really a choice, not really a
decision. Fate, karma, whatever we call it, was moving me toward Leavenworth.
I’m still trying to know the reasons. I am sometimes astonished that Fate went
to so much trouble. Landing on the Cheyenne reservation in late January had not
been my plan. The day before, I could not have predicted it. And when I arrived,
I found myself amid eight friends whom, though I had just met, I had always
known. It is difficult to explain the magic of those few weeks. I am still
trying to know it myself. I can see, however, that much of what I am working to
become was started there. Late one evening at the end of March, David Carson
knocked on the door. "Well, you’ve done it" What? "You protesters have done it.
Johnson just announced that he’s quitting. He won’t run again and he’s stopped
the bombing" We all met over at David’s apartment to celebrate. The elation of
those hours compares with nothing else in my life, before or since. We thought
that the war was over. We thought that the protest culture had won. We had
chanted "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" It was not clear
until later that evil is bigger than the people who are caught in it’s service.
Other servants would be found. The age of Aquarius was not dawning after all.

I do not remember her name, she was not in my circle of 8 friends. She was
very pale and was wearing black. We were gathered at the little red house a few
days after Johnson’s announcement when the woman came in. "Some one has
assassinated Martin Luther King" she told us. The nature and power of evil was
becoming clearer. By the end of that week I had left for my confrontations with
prison and with the military.

By the time I reached Leavenworth, in mid July, I had already been
court-martialed twice, but I had not made my point, apparently. The Army still
thought that I could be motivated to do my duty. The third, and decisive,
court-martial took place in Leavenworth. After three months in solitary
confinement, the authorities began to believe me. I received a sentence of three
years in confinement on election day, 1968. Richard Nixon got four years that
day. I stayed in Leavenworth for 18 months. Leavenworth was a brutal place, an
assault on the soul. When I left there after a year and a half, I had made my
point: I would not go to Vietnam. But the battle (the racial tension, the
criminal machismo, the continual confrontation with the authorities) had taken
its toll on me. My spirit was crushed. I was angry, bitter, and cynical. And I
had no more strength to fight the good fight. In time, I developed a medical
model view of my experience. If a boulder crushes a man’s leg, then even it he
receives the best treatment, and even though he may regain some use of the limb,
he will always remain crippled by that injury. A boulder had fallen on me. I
believed that my soul would always be the victim of that injury."

My parents met and married soon after he got out- under the sparkling banner of the Bahá’í Revelation, as it then was in the South. They met on the "Dawn Buggy," a big, painted bus, driving through South Carolina on the way to a Bahá’í conference. They talked about heroism, ending the War, race unity, and sacrifice. And it was in the quake of that time and place that my sister and I came into this world. For the record, it is amazing what a man with a broken spirit can do. My father’s example in my childhood was the greatest moral lesson of my life.
In 1923, hundreds of white people traveled across the state of Florida to the city of Rosewood during the first days of January, those 86 years ago. Some came from out of state to participate in the destruction and show of force. To kill. The Governor of Florida did nothing. The National Guard did nothing. The town of Rosewood is abandoned now, no one ever returned there to live. Many residents who survived evacuated to Gainesville, and their descendents were certainly among those who attended my high school and knew the de facto segregation of my school district. Rosewood is marked now only by a sign on the side of the road, and by the marks in the deep recesses of memory.

The Klu Klux Klan used to have rallies in the park where we had Bahá’í Youth Workshop practice in Gainesville when I was a teenager. Sometimes I wonder if it was at that same park where they rallied on New Year’s Eve in 1922, in the days just before the Rosewood Massacre, over a hundred of them under a burning cross and a simple banner declaring the justification for their mission and coming violence:

"First and Always Protect Womanhood."

And I see Lexie Gordon, hiding under her house in the moments just before she was killed. Not a woman. Not to them. Not protected. I see Sandi Smith in Greensboro, with a gun pressed between her eyes.

George W. Bush, October 11, 2001:

"For us too, in the year 2001, an enemy has emerged … They dwell in the dark
corners of the earth. And there, we will find them…They consider themselves
pious and devout, while subjecting women to fierce brutality."

Womanhood the excuse to extort oil pipelines and export American racism to the next generation. To rape Afghanistan and Iraq. . There is no such thing as a just war.

When I emerged from the grayness of the train station last Tuesday morning onto the corner of Jackson and Dearborn, it had just started to snow, but was surprisingly sunny. I had been so lost in thought I had forgotten what stood at that corner. The Federal Building. I was flooded with an almost surreal feeling of lightness and the memory of every single time I had been down to that building, almost always in the freezing cold, often in crowds, but sometimes alone, protesting over the last eight years. Thoughts of friends arrested. Thoughts of friends made. Marching through the street, packed tight, shoulder to shoulder, trying to get off and on the trains in the first weeks of the Iraq War. Chanting outside the Leo Burnett building. "The.Whole.World’s.Watching. The.Whole.World’s.Watching." Skipping class to demonstrate. Thinking of my father. Being there almost every day during the heat of it. Feeling outside of my skin when I couldn’t be there for any reason. The sight of it this morning was a sudden revelation, an unbidden visitation of a former time and place. A former self. My womanhood had come into being during those days and weeks and years. The sight of it, of Federal Plaza, and of the bright red Calder stabile, made me feel like a planet snapped suddenly into return from the coldest reach of its orbit. I had just caught sight of a long forgotten sun. I crossed Dearborn and entered the Plaza, which was nearly empty. This was where my sun-had-entered-Aries. I saw myself then. Half a Bahá’í. Praying more in Arabic than in English. Praying harder. Two years into the Bush Administration. Seventeen months and thirteen days since we invaded Afghanistan.

At 9:34 p.m., on the evening of March 19, 2003 (March 20: 5:34 a.m. in Baghdad) I was giving "Exam Week Emergency Stress Rescue" massages in the student union of Northwestern University. It was my final shift to fulfill the Community Outreach requirement for my Massage Therapy diploma, a step I felt would strengthen my skills as a doula. No one was signing up. Everyone was too busy studying. This gave me ample opportunity to talk on the phone to friends in San Francisco protesting what had come to feel like the looming inevitability of the Iraq invasion. We had developed the habit of checking in on each other to make sure the other hadn’t been arrested. There was a lot of noise on his end, cops had been beating demonstrators. He was really moved by how non-violent the crowds were being, and really shaken by the violence of the police officers.

"Ok, take care of yourself out there."

"We love you. Be careful."

"I love you, too."

On several large, loud, synchronized blaring television screens, these images of dawn in Baghdad appeared:















Soon to be followed by announcements by both George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. And those images would soon be followed by these:














Worse had arrived. There was total silence throughout the room. Everyone stared together at what was happening before us. A few students slipped out and made quick calls on their cell phones, but everyone stayed glued to the news coverage. After it became abundantly clear what was happening, that there was a war, people stopped any pretense of studying. The room stayed mostly silent outside of the sounds of the attacks and newscasters. After a few minutes, people started coming up to my table and signing up for massage. It was surreal. There were no exchanges of small talk or "it hurts there, more pressure, please, a little more to the right." Just very leaden, very still bodies laying on my massage table, breathing shallowly the way people do when they are very, very sad. Or scared. I rubbed backs to the sounds of CNN and bomb blasts. Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. For the first and only time I worked that shift at Northwestern, every single person who signed up for massage had a Middle Eastern name. I kept thinking about what time it was in Baghdad and that people would have been sleeping. Families would be getting ready for their day. Little kids walking to school. I kept thinking about my friends in San Francisco and the loved ones on the other ends of all of those phone calls the students were making. My heart was in my throat and I was scared for my friends in San Francisco and at Jackson and Dearborn and I couldn’t get them on the phone again, I couldn’t get in touch, and I was scared for the people I couldn’t see in Baghdad, for the friends of friends and cousins-once-removed and strangers-in-law laying on my massage table. Did any of us have friends or family in the part of Baghdad being bombed? I kept thinking, it’s Naw-Rúz. Fuck. It’s Naw-Rúz.

I packed up my massage table sometime after midnight. I do not remember the drive home. My friend was arrested. Along with over 2,000 other people in San Francisco over the next 24 hours.

The next night, after the first official day of the invasion, approximately 15,000 Chicagoans rallied at the Federal Building and marched on Lake Shore Drive, closing it for business.
This is what democracy looked like:













The police blocked and detained them, and illegally arrested over 750 protesters that night. It was the largest mass-arrest in Chicago history, and we have a way with mass-arrests. More than a hundred more people got arrested in the days after.

But that one night, I was not at the corner of Jackson and Dearborn. I was not arrested on Lake Shore Drive. I was looking into the faces and pressing the hands of the spiritual community of my upbringing at the Bahá’í House of Worship, looking for some kind of something. Some kind of spiritual community, I guess. I wore a duct tape arm-band around my sleeve with the word "Peace" written on it with a black pen. I wanted to be downtown stopping traffic, but I needed to be with my people that night. These people. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but that night was my goodbye to a certain kind of relationship I had to the Bahá’í community. Naw-Rúz 2003, the first 24 hours of the War, would be the last event I would attend before I officially resigned from the Bahá’í Faith.

The next night, belatedly, I jumped over a candle and went with a Bahá’í friend downtown for that night’s protest. It certainly was a New Day:














The cops had cleared everyone out when we arrived, and we had the eerily silent Plaza almost to ourselves. We sat down on a bench in front of the Calder and began to pray. Loudly. In Arabic. For Peace. The Calder is an abstract representation of a bird, but to me it looks like a flame against the black backdrop of the surrounding buildings. I chanted a verse from the Qur’an. The Chicago Police Department was not impressed. A police officer stood guard and stared, but he did not arrest us. I smiled at him sincerely, said goodnight as we walked past, and looked away. Just like my mamma taught me.

I was already beginning to struggle with my language for God. I had covertly switched the gender of the deity involved in all that praying. Pulled the rug out from under Allah, so to speak. It seems appropriate now to have done that beneath a giant, vermilion bird.

Bismillatir-rahman, ir-raheem

Tuesday morning, a week ago, I circumambulated the Calder, first widdershins and then clockwise. The Inauguration was scheduled to start in less than an hour yet there wasn’t a single protester on the Plaza. Only the occasional happy face. I thought of those prayers I’d made at the dawn of the War, and who I was when I’d made them. I thought about what had actually gotten us here. What had actually brought this change, due to take place in under an hour. I began to mumble under my breath:

In the Name of….us. The compassionate. The merciful. The angry. The
outraged.
The disenfranchised, yet unwilling to forsake hope. The winners of
daily battles.
The losers of daily battles. Sandi Smith. Lexie Gordon. Human beings, Human Spirit.

Human Spirit before whom there is no other Spirit.

The sovereigns, the sources of peace, the guardians of faith in
humanity,
the preservers of security, the activists, the school teachers,
the Woolworth’s lunch-counter sitters, the freedom riders, the ACLU lawyers,
the documentarians, the political prisoners, the journalists, the
protesters, the grandmothers, the voters, the revolutionaries … my mother, my
father…

Glory be to our Humanity: Beyond any Associations:
the creator, the
evolver, the bestower of form.

To us belong the most beautiful of names.

It only took a few minutes to reach Hyde Park. The people on the bus and on the street were calm and happy. Quick to smile. Everyone looking for reasons to start conversation. My friend from high school lived only a few blocks from the Obamas, and had become a doctor of Political Science since I saw him last at our segregated high school. He gave commentary on the laws and ritual of the proceedings as we watched them on TV. It didn’t take long for the countdown to begin: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

At 12:00, noon, Eastern Standard Time, the nuclear launch codes transferred out of the hands of George W. Bush and I began to cry. The two most politically empowered terrorists in the world, George Bush and Dick Cheney, lost their power. And a black man named Barack Hussein Obama became President of the United States. It felt like Christmas, Eid, the Ninth Day of Ridvan, and Juneteenth Day all rolled into one:

War. Is. Over. If. We. Want. It.

We toasted. I kept crying. We had lived through it. Not everyone did.

My father recently shared with me something he wrote many years ago about his experience dealing with the aftermath of Vietnam. It is based on an account of an Inuit myth:

"…when a youth wants to become a shaman of the tribe, he must surrender himself
to be seized by demons and taken into hell. There, he will be descended upon by
a legion of demons who will painfully devour him in a mad frenzied fit of
eating. Not a single consumable part will survive. Nothing will remain except a
pile of dry, white bones. After a long time, an agent, which I cannot recall,
takes the bones back to the earth where rain falls upon them. From the bones,
and the earth, and the rain, the man is resurrected. And from that time on, no
demon which participated in the feast of his flesh can ever again have any power
over him. When I read this story, I immediately knew that I was reading about
myself. I knew that the medical model of my injury was wrong and that a path
toward healing was possible. I don’t know exactly how it will work, but I am
finding my way back to the earth, and I believe that I am starting to feel the
rain."

The express bus to Hyde Park goes down Lake Shore Drive, beginning at the section shut down by protesters the night the War began. Naw-Rúz 2003, the night a lot of things began. The last time I had seen this stretch of road, I was cramped in the back of a hatchback between a carseat and a pregnant, laboring woman. I was holding her partially aloft above the seat with my arms and my hip during the drive to the hospital. I had positioned myself as a shock absorber between her pelvis and the bumpy road until I couldn't feel my hands anymore. I have done thousands of laps around Labor & Delivery hallways with pacing mothers, I have held hands and wiped up vomit and blood. I, more often than not, have climbed fully-clothed into whatever shower or birthing tub a woman was in so I could compress her sacrum from the right angle to help minimize her pain, emerging soaked for the remainder of the labor and delivery. I have bruised my hands from providing hour after hour of counter-pressure to a woman's hips, to her back, to her pelvis. I have basically contorted myself into every freakshow, oddball supportive posture imaginable to make labor safer and less painful for women. To safeguard the passage. That’s what being a doula is about. It gets tiring. Doulas never leave, we are with you during the entire duration of active labor. Holding your hand. Cleaning up vomit. A few years ago, well into day two of a client's labor, I was very tired. Luckily, for a short while she was able to sleep between contractions and so I would, too. But it is not a normal sleep you sleep when awakened every 3 to 5 minutes to breathe through contractions with and hold space for a woman giving birth. You always have your eye on that woman. And even when you are sleeping, you are there and you are holding her hand. The instant her breathing changes, or her fingers start to tighten, you are fully present for whatever she needs. You are fully present for her for every single contraction. On average, a couple of hundred contractions every birth. If this is your work, you are present for a lifetime of them.

It is the same with anything we endeavor to birth into this world. It is the same with Justice.

After the Inauguration, my friend gave me a ride home, and we drove past the Obama’s house. Their pre-White House house. We talked about the fight for justice. That this is not the end. That we cannot afford to take our eyes off it, even in this great day. But Justice did pour down like waters this week upon America. And Righteousness like a mighty stream.