I find myself thinking about something Marshall Rosenberg, founder of Nonviolent Communication, said several years ago. If any of us were walking along a river bank and heard a baby cry and looked down and saw it precariously floating all alone down the river, we would, of course, jump in and save the baby. And, he said, if another baby came floating by, we’d jump in again, and if that other was followed by still another and another after that until there was a steady stream of babies floating down the river, we would also round up other people and begin to organize in order to save all the babies. But finally, he said, someone has to go up the river and see who’s throwing them in.

The question for me is what do you do when you get there, when you’ve gone up river and you encounter, not the thrower of the babies, but the confused, angry, and hardened faces of those called upon to defend a face they do not clearly see and a process they do not understand. What do you do when you are showered with rubber bullets, when pepper spray is aimed at your face, and tear gas falls all around as you rescue a fallen comrade?  What do you do with your outrage?  What do you do when you find you have joined those others who have “gone up river”  before you in Selma and Birmingham, in Tiananmen Square and Cairo, in Bombay and at Kent State?  How do you remember to stand your ground, to not fight back, to place flowers in gun barrels, to sing in the face of tyranny, to lock arms and stay the course?  How do you remember, as Scott Olsen lies in an Oakland Hospital, that ” the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice “? And what do you do when those who throw babies in rivers refuse to acknowledge what they’re doing,  won’t let themselves be seen and won’t allow themselves to be addressed?