Memory Rising, Truth Marching: On Art, Protest, and the Sacred Refusal to Hand the World Back to Kings

Hope Infusion “No Kings Edition” - June 16, 2025

Rhythm & Reckoning

On Saturday night, I witnessed a revolution wrapped in rhythm.

In a season thick with sorrow and rising resistance, I found myself seated in a small theater for “Young John Lewis”, a hip hop musical chronicling the early life of the late civil rights icon who gave us the phrase “good trouble.”

Just hours after millions flooded the streets in a sweeping act of protest, I watched actors channel the spirit of a generation who once did the same. The music was magnificent, the dramatization gripping, the parallels sobering.

During intermission, a friend from Minnesota texted informing me that despite the morning’s horrifying violence, more than 80,000 people turned out to protest in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Warnings had circulated to stay home, but the people came anyway.

That is what good trouble looks like in 2025!

I hold no illusions about the darkness rising. But that night, scrolling clip after clip of peaceful defiance, even in deep red states, I saw flickers of something else: a collective remembering. A kindling. A fire not yet burnt out.

We Are the Dream Undaunted

On the day violence tried to silence a voice for the people, MILLIONS more rose up and found their thunder.

They gathered not in palaces, but on street corners, not with tanks, but with signs that made a profound declaration: This Land Is Ours.

It was not just a march.
It was memory rising.
It was an oath reborn.

This is not about one man.
This is about the denouncing the 
myth he embodies:

That power belongs to the few
instead of the many.
That might makes right.
That glory bows only to gold.

But the people know better.
The founding army was never the president’s.
It was always the people’s.
Democracy is not spectacle, it is stewardship.
Power is not theater, it is trust.

And so we gathered
in red states and blue,
in rusted towns and neon cities
to speak one sacred refusal:

No kings.
Not now.
Not ever.

The tyrant’s parade was thin,
his crowd restless, his appointees weary,
his ego battered.

But the people’s parade?
It thundered with joy.
It blazed with flags,
NOT claimed by fear,
But reclaimed by love.

This is the reckoning.
The soul of a nation that will not bow to spectacle. 
No matter what the empire threatens.

We are the living resistance.
We are the unwritten future.
We are the dream undaunted.

And we remember:
Power must answer to the people.
History is made not by the crowned,
but by the courageous.

We are not here to hand the world back to kings.
We are here as a reminder of to whom it belongs!

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Parting Thoughts

What I witnessed this weekend, on stage, in the streets, in the souls of those who refuse to back down, was not just protest. It was prophecy. A reclaiming of memory and meaning. A reminder that art, like resistance, doesn’t merely reflect the world, it remakes it.

Let the cynics say hope is naïve. Let the fearful cling to shadows. But we who carry the drumbeat of justice in our bones know that hope lives on. And every time we rise, create, gather, or grieve out loud, we echo its power.

We are still becoming. And we are not done yet!

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