STAND

Written September 10, 2016

Four years ago, I wrote a short play that gets performed a handful of times each year. It is a comedy where William Dawes sues Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for causing American posterity to remember Paul Revere instead of Dawes by writing the famous poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.” The judge ultimately throws out the case because Paul Revere convinces him that the poem is not about the messenger but about the message. When the judge asks Revere what the message is, he reads the last few lines of the poem:

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

The judge again asks what the word is that shall echo forevermore. What is the work that the people will waken and listen to hear? What is the midnight message of Paul Revere?

Paul bows his head and simply says, “Stand.”

Confused, the Judge asks for clarification. Revere quotes John McCain from his September, 2008 speech:

Fight for what’s right for our country. Fight for the ideals and character of a free people. Fight for our children’s future. Fight for justice and opportunity for all. Stand up to defend our country from its enemies. Stand up for each other; for beautiful, blessed, bountiful America. Stand up! Stand up! Stand up and fight!”

In the hour of darkness and peril and need, it is our duty not just as Americans, but as members of the human race to stand. To stand against injustice and evil. To stand for our friends and family and neighbors and all others we don’t even know. For when one injustice happens to one of us, injustice happens to all of us.

Today I attended a rally in Salt Lake City, Utah to voice support for the protectors of our water in Standing Rock, South Dakota. An oil company intends to put an oil pipeline through their land and under a lake and in the Missouri River. In addition to threatening the land on which the Native Americans of Standing Rock live, the company is threatening the water supply. The company has destroyed sacred sites and has used attack dogs and pepper spray to get Standing Rock to back down.

It is injustice at its very core.

At the rally, a person who had been to Standing Rock, who was there as people from all over the country arrived to help, and even welcomed the tribes from North Dakota as they sailed in on their canoes, spoke to us. Her words sent the warming truth vibes through my heart. I must paraphrase her since I don’t recall her exact words: “Standing Rock is one tribe. Each of us belongs to one tribe or another. But long ago, we each lived as one tribe. We simply moved to different parts of the world. But we are all one tribe still. And when one tribe is threatened, every tribe is threatened. When injustice happens to one, it happens to all.”

I believe that one-hundred percent. Last year, I stood with the LGBT tribe in solidarity when their rights were violated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I stood because I knew that this organization was doing to families was wrong. I stood because it was a blow not just to my LGBTQ friends and family, but to all of us.

I stood because every person is born with the natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I stood because governments are instituted among men to protect these rights, not take them away. I stood because injustice occurs whenever government chooses money and power instead of protecting individual rights.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”  I don’t know those people in Standing Rock. I don’t have to. They are my friends simply because they are part of the human tribe. Their trouble is my trouble. It’s our trouble. This is their hour of darkness and peril and need. And like Paul Revere, I invite all to stand and make your voices heard: to defend freedom wherever it is threatened.