I dropped off my son at lacrosse practice Monday night, drove home to start dinner, threw some clothes in the dryer, unloaded the dishwasher, re-loaded the dishwasher, and turned on the Chicago Bulls to see them losing spectacularly in Oklahoma City.
Sen. Cory Booker was just getting going on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
I got up Tuesday morning, and he was still going.
I went for a run, went to work, went to a board meeting, went to the store. And he was still going.
I finished my workday and folded some laundry and paid some first-of-the-month bills and texted my daughter and went to a lacrosse game. And he was still going.
I caught glimpses where I could and sound-bites when I had time and texted friends when I remembered (“are you watching this?”) and thought, over and over: This is big.
This 25-hour, four-minute span — which so many of us filled with the mundane, beautiful minutiae of life — felt like a shift. Felt like a glimpse. Felt like a life raft when you’re flailing around in the sea; it’s not where you want to stay for good, but it’ll keep you afloat till you get there.
It’s something to hold on to.
Booker’s speech broke a record for the Senate’s longest, set ingloriously by South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour, 18-minute filibuster of a Civil Rights bill in 1957.
There’s power in that symbolism — a speech championing the marginalized supplanting a speech that shoved people to the margins. A segregationist’s record broken by a man whose rights he fought to deny.
“I’m not here, though, because of his speech,” Booker said of Thurmond. “I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”
Booker spoke about his constituents.
“They’re writing me letters with words like fear and terror,” he said. “They’re talking about staying up at night and not being able to sleep because they don’t have a president that comforts them. They have a president that talks down to them, that lies about the services that they rely on. What is this? It is not normal. It is not normal.”
A shift.
“This is America!” he extolled. “Every one of our founders’ documents is riddled with words that speak to our commitment to each other. Yeah, they were imperfect geniuses. But they were people that aspired to virtue. They read the greatest philosophers of their time. They said, ‘What does it mean to be good to one another? What does it mean to create a society that is not run by despots and dictators who are so disconnected?’ They dreamed of a different country than this, folks. They dreamed of a different country. … They dreamed of a nation where any child, born in any circumstance, in any place, could grow up and have their American Dream.”
He spoke about unity.
“It’s not right or left,” he said. “It’s right or wrong. It’s not a partisan moment. It’s an American moment. It’s a moral moment.”
That was hour 19.
“This is America,” he said. “How could the most powerful people in this land not comfort others? Not tell them they have nothing to fear but fear itself? Not tell them to have malice towards none but have charity towards all? What kind of man is in our White House that makes fun of the disabled?”
He quoted John Lewis. He quoted John McCain. He condemned the rash of recent detainments, reading aloud at one point from Canadian citizen Jasmine Mooney’s account of being held by U.S. immigration enforcement officers for two weeks. He defended Medicaid and Social Security. He spoke about our obligation to one another.
“What is it when a nation isn’t taking care of its elders?” he said. “It’s a crisis of our national character.”
Critics will say he’s angling for a run at the White House. Fine. The current occupant is angling for an unconstitutional third term. Angle away.
Most of us aren’t political strategists. Most of us aren’t pollsters. Most of us don’t eat, sleep and breathe election cycles.
We eat, sleep and breathe Mondays. And Tuesdays. We eat, sleep and breathe rides to practice and remembering the Gatorade for games and doing the dishes and making the meals and paying the bills and taking care of all the mundane, beautiful minutiae of life with the people we cherish, the people we care for, the people we live for.
And we’re hungry for some hope. We’re looking for some guidance. We’re casting about for role models — for ourselves and for our kids. We’re listening for someone to say: This is not the America we’ve been working toward. This is not normal.
In Booker’s speech, we heard it.
Will it change any policies? I can’t say. Will it swing any votes? Hard to know. Will it open any hearts? Who can predict.
What I know is this, and I’ve shared it here before.
Abraham Johannes Muste, a Dutch-born activist, ordained minister and author, spent his adulthood in the U.S. agitating for the labor movement and the religious pacifist movement. He died in 1967.
I first read this anecdote about him on Facebook, but I’ve found multiple other references to it. It goes like this:
Muste was standing outside the White House holding a candle during the Vietnam War, which he did every night in quiet protest of the conflict. He was approached by a reporter, who is said to have asked, “Do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night in front of the White House with a candle?”
And Muste is said to have replied, “Oh, I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”
I think about Muste and his candle a lot lately. And I think Booker just provided a similar light.
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Originally Published: April 3, 2025 at 5:00 AM CDT
