“Do not go gentle into that good night…”

In 2019, I worried about the administration withholding funds from the 1619 Project, a body of research and discourse that sought to lift up the date the first Africans were brought to this continent by slave traders and count US history from that date, rather than the schoolchild 1776 date. That was just a warm-up.

Project 2025 cancels the Enlightenment.

Education of any kind is a dream now; people of color and immigrants and refugees and poor folk and the differently abled or non-binary of gender are finding recognition of their personhood slowly or quickly evaporating in the public realm; women’s rights to full autonomy over their persons have never been fully secured and threats are being redoubled; these are only the opening salvos. Rights to privacy for everyone have vanished.

(Somebody in the back is asking: “Ah, now, Sparky, are you going to bring us all the way down?”)

No. I still have hope that people will raise hell and stop this madness.

But this four-year-old’s irrational, psychotic destructiveness… is why we can’t have nice things.

And at worst, if people just roll over for the nonsense coming out of Washington, we might be in for a dark time — way worse than the incumbent’s last rampage.

So let’s not go gentle into that good night.

Dylan Thomas may have been talking about going into the “good night” of death, but he could also have been talking about going into any of the places where we relinquish ourselves: places where we lose our freedom; our autonomy; our sense of purpose; even our car keys (no, I mean it–though soon enough we’ll all be wishing we had stayed on foot).

But I’m a wannabe Jesus follower, so I have to ask: What Would Jesus Do? We all know the “blessed are the meek” thing. What would Jesus say if I’m not meek or gentle about all these toxic shenanigans? And the answer is, I don’t know. Actually, no one really knows what Jesus did do. But I have a few ideas.

Am I going to get in trouble with Jesus?

So I go to the experts on Jesus: namely, the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar and their controversial, highly readable volume, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. And I look up what the fellows say about that passage, “blessed are the gentle.”

Here’s the scholars’ translation of part of that Sermon the Mount:

Congratulations to the poor in spirit:
Heaven’s domain belongs to them.
Congratulations to those who grieve!
They will be consoled.
Congratulations to the gentle!
They will inherit the earth.
Congratulations to those who hunger and thirst for justice!  They will have a feast.

And there it is, darn it. “Congratulations” if I’m gentle.

But then I quickly look and discover — hah! According to the Fellows, Jesus probably never said that. He might have said the other, unexpected sayings — “Congratulations to the poor in spirit,” for example — what does that even mean? Jesus was sometimes rude; let’s admit it. And when you trace the likely authentic sayings, you find a Jesus who came, not just to sit back, but to make what John Lewis would later call “good trouble”  

So I’m not going to go gentle. 

They think they can cancel the whole Enlightenment? 

Oh hell no

Not while there are those of us out there who heed the poet:

“Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.”

I’m no man, but Thomas was a twentieth century child barbarian, so I’ll pretend he includes me in his dumb generic (nobody knew any better then).

Or maybe, knowing we didn’t do enough to prevent these crises, we will all cry out this way:

“Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

So I’ll not go gentle

So if I want to fight this premature nightfall, I will have to accept the discipline to resist injustice, and maybe even to risk loss and suffering.  I gather I’m not supposed to punch people in the neck, but I AM allowed to resist–even if it means giving up my prestigious corporate sponsor and alienating my family.

I’m just kidding of course.  There is no prestigious corporate sponsor, and my family would totally love to see me do something besides talk.

But let’s start with loud insistence on truth–generating as much light as we can, and hope for heat as well.

Because I don’t wanna be a wanna be follower…

I’d like to be a genuine follower of the One

who wasn’t afraid to turn over tables in the Temple.

And I’d rather be a has-been than a never-was.

So I will not go gentle if they try take away the light.

And I don’t think I’ll get in trouble with Jesus, either.

 

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