Where it happens

If you've seen the movie "Amazing Grace" about William Wilberforce and his crusade to end the English slave trade, you probably, like me, got a certain measure of goosebumps at the end when Parliament finally passed the law that ended the practice in the British Empire.

It's an emotional moment, made more so by the tributes to Wilberforce by his peers, who recognized his steadfast devotion to a righteous cause that they themselves so often failed to have the courage to stand for. Can you imagine what it would have been like to be in the room when something so monumental took place? I've seen that movie a half dozen times and it never fails to make me want to make such a difference in my time. But the idea always fades.

This week it burst to life again, without having watched the movie again. I did not have the opportunity to be transported to early 19th century England, but I got what, oddly, might be the next best thing: a seat in the third row at a Virginia house of delegates committee meeting.

The setting seems innocuous enough -- perhaps even boring. I myself yawned in the middle of writing the sentence. But I was in rapt attention during the hour or so I was in that room on Thursday morning. If you've done this a hundred times, as most of my colleagues have, the impact has doubtless worn off, but not for me. It was a whole new world ... a world beyond rhetoric, bluster, promises, libel, accusations, lies, half-truths and endless debate -- everything that politics usually brings to mind.

Politics has always been a topic of discussion, a dividing point and a surefire way to turn friends into enemies, spoil moods and kills conversations. In that room though it was something else entirely: it was action. It was a moment. It was the hinge upon which the door of history turns. In that room ... it's where it happens. It's where modern day Wilberforce moments can happen. If such change is to happen in our lifetime (and it must, because there are as many horrors in this day as there were in his), it will happen in rooms like that one.

In that room dreams, idealistic goals and ambitious visions of righteous movements became attainable. Because, in the end, all you have to do is get more people to decide to act than to stay silent.

What's stopping us?