Mary Ann Cub

Woman,Wife,Sister,Librarian. Old enough to know better & too old to care what anyone thinks. 🚫DMs. #Resistance. Stand for Democracy.🚫🚫🚫DMS.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@ThePlumLineGS Republicans have become the party of duplicity. It doesn’t appear to have occurred to them, or they just don’t care, that they will be judged harshly when the history of these times is written. Lies are a disqualifier for leadership.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@Michaeljos92972 Hoping for good news for you, Michael.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@Michaeljos92972

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@Glastomichelle You’re very fortunate to be living in such a beautiful place.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@mooseandmouse Heartfelt sympathy to you on the loss of your loved one.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@Kristinartz Still do it with my husband every now and then.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@scottybhoy31 He’s beautiful. Happy birthday!

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@Joeinblack Thank you for this. I never understood the denial of baptism, especially to an infant or young child.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@HWarlow The joyful expression on that dog’s face!

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

I cried today. I'm not going to pretend I didn't.

Four presidents shared a stage in Chicago, a thing that used to be ordinary and now feels almost holy, and I felt the tears come before I understood them. At first I thought I knew what they were. I thought they were grief. I thought I was crying for how far we've drifted from that morning in 2008 when so many of us let ourselves believe, all the way down, that America could be better than her history. That we could be better. The distance between that morning and this one felt like the whole sad arc of the story, and for a moment I let myself sit inside the ache of it.

But the longer President Obama spoke, the more I understood I had it backwards.

He told a story I can't stop thinking about. The line we all know, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, didn't start with Dr. King. King was borrowing it from a Boston minister named Theodore Parker, who preached it more than 170 years ago. And here is the part that broke me open: Parker preached it at one of the darkest moments this country had ever seen. The Compromise of 1850 had just made it a federal crime to shelter a man fleeing slavery. In Boston, a young fugitive had been seized, tried, and marched to the harbor by hundreds of armed officers, put on a ship, and sent back south into chains. While the whole city watched.

That is when Parker said it. Not in triumph. In the dark.

He admitted he couldn't see how it would end. “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe,” he preached. “The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve... I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.”

He couldn't see it. He believed it anyway. And then he kept fighting.

As Obama put it today, Parker's words were “a declaration of faith, a defiant call, not to abandon hope or give way to fear, but to stay true to our better selves, and true to one another, and to keep fighting... even in the face of cruelty and bitter disappointment, even in the face of impossible odds.”

And that's when my tears changed. Right there. They stopped being grief and became something else, something that scared me a little with how much it felt like hope. Because I realized I wasn't witnessing a eulogy for a country we'd lost. I was watching a man reach down and hand us back the very thing we had set down in our exhaustion. The arc doesn't bend on its own. It never did. It bends because people put their hands on it and pull, people who can't see the end and reach for it anyway. People in the dark, refusing to believe the dark gets the last word.

He would not let the day be about him. He said it plainly: America's story “isn't frozen in the past. It has chapters yet to be written, not by one person or a few people, not by Barack and Michelle... but by all of us.” Michelle said the same thing in her own way, that the center was never about them, never for them. Look up at that building and you'll see three words cut into the stone: You are America.Not him. Not them. You. Us. The ordinary, the unfamous, the tired, us.

And then Bruce Springsteen walked out with a guitar and sang “Land of Hope and Dreams.” If you don't know it, it's a song about a train, a train with room for everybody on it. Saints and sinners. The lost. The broken. The ones who've been left standing at every other station their whole lives. This train carries everybody. He sang it soft and aching, like a prayer he wasn't sure would be answered but was going to say anyway, and when the last note left him he turned to the Obamas and said the only thing left to say. “I love you.”

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@JoyceWhiteVance The steeper his decline, the more his party fears the lashing out.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@HWarlow Charming work.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@AnnieForTruth @txpeace22 Breaking news(NOT): Trump’s promises are worthless.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@MediawatchNw I may adopt it.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@johncosgrove405 I hope his love of learning lasts a lifetime.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@Michaeljos92972 He’s looking grownup.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@DrNeilStone Some out feels like we’re living in insane times and it’s only getting worse.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@JoeNewberry I miss that show.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@EastEndJoe Cute kitty.

[Mary Ann Cub @maycub]

@captainblack566 1453