Carrying on the tradition

Yeah, okay—I know that technically this is three days late; “Auld Lang Syne” is for New Year’s Eve. But this rendition—by members of a Birmingham, Ala., choir singing in a church where only a few years ago the deacons refused to seat African Americans—has haunted me for more than four years, and when listening and re-listening to it in the past week, it has struck me as such a powerful avatar of hope.

I first shared it at the end of 2020, when it felt like we’d been through hell but were turning a corner to someplace at least less hellish, and then again last year in my round-up of notable deaths. I keep coming back to it because it’s more than just the words of Robert Burns; it’s the words overlaying video of Americans who—faced with the worst of 2020—became their best. I cannot watch this without being brought to tears, both for the possibilities for progress it shows and for the sharp pain of what we’ve lost in the backlash to those possibilities.

But here’s something that passed through my Bluesky feed this week, from Indian revolutionary Chandrashekhar Azad, who added that surname (meaning “The Free”) when he appeared before a magistrate the first time he was arrested, at age 15, for protesting the British raj in 1921: “What we are to face has been faced a thousand times and it has been defeated a thousand times before; we are merely those called to now carry on a tradition.”

(Azad died in a shootout with police in Allahabad in 1931.)

This resonates deeply with me. The fight against tyranny, against ignorance, against religious intolerance, against plutocratic greed, against racism, misogyny, homo- and transphobia—against all the forces of fear and rage that have manifested themselves in different garb in different times…that’s been going on for millennia. We win battles, we plant crops, we raise children and then we find that the enemy has regrouped, rearmed and recruited new foot soldiers ready to launch an attack.

I confess, it’s wearying. It’s like we’re dealing with the Lernaean Hydra: cut off one head and two more grow back. We’re never done done.

And yet—as Azad reminds us, this is a tradition that must be carried on, and we are the current incumbents to that tradition. As this video shows—we are definitely up to it. Heracles eventually scotched the snake with the help of his nephew Iolaus; he couldn’t do it alone, but working together with a partner, he did. What we’re up against may seem like a mythic monster, but they’re humans and they are not the undead.

We got this.

 

 

 

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