A Change Is Gonna Come ?
Tomorrow, Saturday morning I will leave early for Chicago. This is the third Women’s March in which I will participate. I will be with friends, and will be surrounded by thousands with whom I am in solidarity. People of color, immigrants, and women are diminished to inferior, “second class” status by the actions of the Presidents party. The old Republican Party, advocating conservative values, the willingness to compromise is dead. The Trump Party advocating patriarchy, a father-knows-best, winner-take-all society must be defeated at the ballot box if a democratic, 21st Century America is to be born. Everything that I care about hangs in the balance.
I join others by marching in Chicago to assert my opposition to the summary deportation of immigrants seeking asylum, the kidnapping of their children, the mocking dismissal of women who contend they are victim of sexual assault, and other assertions of raw power.
Can I be certain that the change that I want to see is going to come? I cannot. Like my predecessors in the early 1960’s I will resist, for the sake of our common humanity, for my children and my grandchildren.
I can do no better than offer the great hymn written by Sam Cooke in 1964.
The song was inspired by various personal events in Cooke’s life, most prominently an event in which he and his entourage were turned away from a whites-only motel in Louisiana. Cooke felt compelled to write a song that spoke to his struggle and of those around him, and that pertained to the Civil Rights Movement and African Americans. The song contains the refrain, “It’s been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come.”
“A Change Is Gonna Come” is widely considered Cooke’s best composition and has been voted among the best songs ever released by various publications. In 2007, the song was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress, with the National Recording Registry deeming the song “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important.
—Wikipedia
