Last night I dreamed that Nelson Mandela was coming to Fisk. I found out about it by getting caught up in the crowd that was gathering. People were lining the side of the road, finding the best places to park their cars and there was just a general air of excitement and anticipation. (I was at the Georgia Tech Stadium in 1990 when he visited Atlanta. The dream tapped into my memory of that day.)
But there was tension in the crowd. There was a young fiery reporter for the student newspaper who was loudly upset because she had gotten some pushback from the administration which wanted to either limit or completely bar her from asking some hard questions of Mr. Mandela. She had legitimate criticisms and was not going to be held back from expressing them. And then on the other side was my mother. Who fully understood and remembered everything Mandela and South Africans had gone through and wasn't going to allow some young upstart who wasn't alive at the time to question his moral authority.
I woke up thinking about what happens when we win. How, in the midst of struggle, there is clarity of purpose. We can put a lot of things aside as we push toward a shared goal. But when we reach that goal, then we are faced with the reality of making our dreams a reality. In the face of that reality, stuff gets lost. We have to spend so much of our time and effort simply preserving our win. The "win" is never an ending. It's always a new beginning.
When I think about the legacy of South Africa, or Cuba, or Haiti, I think about what we have been able to preserve from those wins. Cuba has been strong enough to remain independent right at the doorstep of the most hostile and aggressive empire. And South Africa is leading the world in calling out Israeli settler colonialism and genocide.
That young upstart who fearlessly questions the legacy of our hard fought wins is necessary to preserve those wins. We can't ever get to the point where we don't question, where we're not ruthlessly deconstructing and interrogating every one of our wins. Because there will not be one decisive big battle that settles everything. Our freedom will be won incrementally, built brick by brick. Some wins will be huge and others small. But we have to, at all times, never get so caught up in the struggle or so carried away by the heady joy of winning that we neglect to self-assess and understand the win in the context of the larger struggle.
Why is this coming up at this Full Moon? Because this Moon is optimistic. It looks forward in the darkest time of year to the returning of the light. It's a good time to reflect and plan for the success that is inevitably coming even in the midst of the battle. It may seem silly right now to plan for success while all outward appearances indicate that nothing is guaranteed. But we know we will succeed.
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