"Calling On Our Better Angels"

It was a glorious smoke ring day in northern California's Santa Cruz mountains. Puffy white clouds billowed up against the azure sky. Golden rays of sunlight filtered through a canopy of towering redwoods creating incandescent pools of light on the forest floor. Adorned in orange and black, a troupe of monarch butterflies danced alongside a bubbling creek bed. In the distance through the trees, the rhythmic hammering of a woodpecker could faintly be heard. It was the kind of day that made you wish tomorrow would never come.

Leaning back in a white Adirondack patio chair on the rear deck of his manager's two-story Pescadero home, 24-year-old Canadian rock star Neil Young sipped from a can of Budweiser trading stories with CSNY bandmate David Crosby. Crosby, Stills Nash and Young - the most popular band in America - had just completed a blockbuster US tour, and both men were looking forward to some down time to work on solo studio projects.

Ten days had passed since Ohio national guard troops leveled their rifles and fired into a crowd of protesters on the campus of Kent State University. Four students, including two bystanders, were killed Eight more were wounded. During the turbulent decade of the 1960's, confrontations between student activists and law enforcement were not uncommon. Tossing rocks, bottles and smoke bombs at the police might get you arrested, but not killed. In the United States of America that just wasn't supposed to happen.

Young's jovial mood darkened when he saw the photograph of a Kent State shooting victim on the cover of the May 15, 1970 issue of Life magazine that Crosby had purchased that morning. "When Neil saw those pictures he got really quiet," recalls Crosby describing Young's reaction to the horrifying images. Without saying a word, Young tossed the magazine to the ground, picked up his vintage Martin guitar and walked off into the woods.

"About an hour later," says Crosby, "Neil came back to the house with a brand new song. After I heard him play it, I called Graham (Nash) and told him, 'Book the studio! Neil just wrote this amazing song and we need to record it now!'" Three days later, Crosby, Stills Nash and Young went into an LA sound stage and recorded "Ohio," the first protest song Neil Young had ever written. Music critics and historians alike consider it to be the greatest rock protest song ever made.

Fifty years later on May 30, 2020, I sat in stunned silence in my family's San Francisco home watching scenes from a cell phone video play over and over again on cable network news. The previous Monday was Memorial Day, and 17-year-old Darnella Frazier accompanied her 9-year-old cousin to the Cups Foods convenience store at the intersection of East 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in the Powder Horn Park neighborhood of Minneapolis.

As they approached the front of the store, Darnella saw a black man in handcuffs pinned face down in the street by two Minneapolis police officers. A third officer pressed his knee into the back of the man's neck. Darnella would later testify, "He was scared, terrified begging for his life." In tears, she reached for her phone and began recording the horrific scene in front of her.

Despite crying out more than twenty times, "I can't breathe!" the man's torment continued. Ten minutes later, George Floyd lay unconscious on the pavement. He was pronounced dead when paramedics finally arrived on the scene. Filled with sorrow and outrage, I turned off the TV and started jotting down some lyrics. I wrote my first protest song, "Revolution Of The Heart" at age 62.

The murder of George Floyd was a trumpet blast of a wake up call for a country lulled into quiet indifference by decades of complicity and complacency. His tragic death confronted white America with the inconvenient truth that hatred, bigotry and racial injustice are woven deeply into the fabric of our nation. Of even greater concern, our democracy is under attack by a populist conservative movement seeking to "Make America Great Again" by disenfranchising people of color - again.

Bonded by principal and the rule of law, we the people are guided by a greater moral compass. "The arc of the moral universe is long," wrote the reformist minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker in 1850. "And while my eyes cannot calculate its curve, by divine conscience I am sure that it bends towards justice."

During a speech in 1965, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. said these prophetic words. "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. Our lives begin to end the day we remain silent about things that matter." When millions took to the streets last summer to call out racism and injustice in a land claiming to be, "one nation under God with liberty and justice for all," generations of silence ended.

Even though the Black Lives Matter protest movement has inspired millions to believe that change will come, history testifies to the harsh reality that no enterprise of man can change the hearts and minds of men. Advocating for the underprivileged and oppressed requires much more than shouting slogans and waving signs. Civil rights legislation is a noble undertaking, but it is not the solution.

The radical change that can move mountains begins in the depths of the human soul. A man is powerless to affect meaningful change in others until he recognizes the need for change within himself. "Take the plank out of your own eye," Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount, "and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." It is these personal evolutions, the revolutions of the heart, that will guide us forward toward a day when there will truly be peace on earth.

During a campaign stop in Indianapolis on the night of April 4, 1968, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy broke the news to a shocked and angry African-American audience that Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis. Quoting from a favorite poem written by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, Kennedy's words offered a glimmer of hope at a time of unspeakable darkness.

Even in our sleep

pain which cannot forget

Falls drop by drop upon the heart

until in our own despair,

Against our will

comes wisdom

Through the awful grace of God.

While cities across America went up in flames that fateful night, a quiet calm prevailed in the streets of Indianapolis. Senator Kennedy's poignant remarks extinguished the smoldering embers of bitterness and hatred in the hearts and minds of his audience. Appealing to their better angels, he called on his fellow Americans to denounce hatred and violence and allow themselves to be guided by the wisdom revealed through forgiveness and grace. And they listened to him.

Two months later after delivering an acceptance speech celebrating his victory in the California primary, Kennedy was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Like his brother the president before him, Robert Kennedy's vision of a more just, compassionate and unified America died with him.

More than a half century after his death, Dr. King's dream of racial equity and justice has yet to be realized. Unarmed black men are dying at the hands of racially biased peace officers in unprecedented numbers. Dante Wright, Rashad Brooks, Alton Sterling, Andre Hill. With each name comes a stark reminder. Although all men are equal in the eyes of their creator, a man of color should not have the audacity to believe that he could be viewed as an equal in the eyes of his fellow man.

In the year 2021, we are a polarized nation - deeply divided- standing at a crossroads in history with nothing less than the future of our democracy at stake. Having vanquished an invisible enemy that claimed over 600,000 American lives, a battle of even greater consequence is now being waged for the soul of our nation. How tragically ironic that the GOP - the party of Lincoln - no longer seeks to form a more perfect union, but instead stokes discord and division in a blatant effort to maintain the reigns of power.

"Our nation will never be destroyed from the outside," declared President Lincoln in 1863. "Should we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves from within." In today's toxic political landscape, the foundation of our republic is being undermined by disinformation and lies - not from our enemies - but from our own leaders. Lincoln's words remind us that democracy is fragile. Purchased with great sacrifice, it's survival depends upon those who have been entrusted to defend it. America has veered onto a very dangerous road that Lincoln warned about 150 years ago. As guardians of the republic, we must steer our country back onto the road of virtue and truth.

It is said that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. It is in the midst of our affliction that hope is buoyed by and unshakeable willingness to persevere. Drop by painful drop in our despair and against our will, God's unmerited grace is revealed leading us first to repentance and then forgiveness. Should we as citizens of this finite planet strive to live according to such divine wisdom the day will come when, "Our children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." The moral arc of the universe is bending toward justice. We need only for our better angels to prevail.