Time is a buffer

a merciful curtain that protects us

and prevents us from seeing what we are not yet ready to accept

In the 1940s, Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz singer and one of the most significant voices in Black music, defied the United States government’s racial discrimination by singing “Strange Fruit” – a protest anthem for civil rights. At a time when Black Americans were denied the right to vote and to fair trials, the song had an enormous impact. It was strongly opposed for being the first popular song to address such themes explicitly.

In 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man while riding a public bus. Less than forty years later, Douglas Wilder, the grandson of slaves, was elected Governor of Louisiana. In the years that followed, Black Americans held positions as Mayor of New York, Governor of Washington, and eventually, Barack Obama became President of the United States.

Now imagine for a moment what might have happened if these events had not been spaced out by four decades. What if time had been compressed, sucked away like air under the vacuum bell in our high school physics experiments? If those forty years had been condensed into an instant? It would have been madness. We might have seen white men throwing a Black man off a bus, only to dust off his clothes moments later to vote him in as Governor, Mayor, or President.

Time is a buffer, a merciful curtain that protects us and prevents us from seeing what we are not yet ready to accept.

Remembering the Future

It would take America forty years to accept and see manifest in its social reality the understanding that Rosa Parks and Black leaders had already reached through their dream of freedom. Like all dreamers, like all divers into the invisible, they had the gift of compressing time and remembering the future – of seeing what others would only see and accept many years later.

For the dream of being free precedes freedom, just as kingship comes before a kingdom. It is the expansion of Being – a rise of awareness that creates freedom. But, as with every form of healing, freedom proceeds from within to without, and it is impossible to give a man – or a people – a degree of freedom they are not yet ready to contain.