The John Lewis funeral.

Live streaming:



I was just listening — on my car radio — to the eulogy by Bill Clinton. I want to say a few things about it — my key words are "cancel" and "infect" — but I will have to wait for the transcript.

ADDED: Obama is giving a eulogy now (at 12:46 CDT). There's a third President there today: George W. Bush. He spoke first, so his is the first transcript that's available. Excerpt:

John’s story began on a tiny farm in Troy, Alabama, place so small he said you could barely find it on the map.... Every morning, he would rise before the sun to tend to the flock of chickens. He loved those chickens. Already called to be a minister who took care of others. John fed them and tended to their every need, even their spiritual ones, for John baptized them. He married them and he preached to them. When his parents claimed one from family supper, John refused to eat one of his flock. Going hungry was his first act of nonviolent protest... He always believed in preaching the gospel, in word and in deed, insisting that hate and fear had to be answered with love and hope. John Lewis believed in the Lord, he believed in humanity and he believed in America. He’s been called an American saint, a believer willing to give up everything, even life itself, to bear witness to the truth that drove him all his life, that we could build a world of peace and justice, harmony, and dignity, and love.... 

AND: Here it is, the Bill Clinton speech, the one where I wanted to highlight "cancel" and "infect":

I think three things happened to John Lewis... that made him who he was. First, the famous story of John at four with his cousins and siblings holding his aunt’s hand more than a dozen of them, running around a little old wooden house, as the wind threatened to blow the house off its moorings, going to the place where the house was rising and all those tiny bodies trying to weigh it down. I think he learned something about the power of working together....

[A]s a child, he learned to walk with the wind... [H]e challenged others to join him with love and dignity, to hold America’s house down and open the doors of America to all its people.... [N]o matter what, John always kept walking to reach the beloved community.... When he could have been angry and determined to cancel his adversaries, he tried to get converts instead....

Twenty years ago when I came here after the Selma March to a big dinner honoring John and Lillian and John-Miles... ... I was almost out of time and people were to be present and people were asking me, “Well, if you could do one more thing, what it would be, or what do you wish you had that you had done that you didn’t?”.... I said, “If I could just do one thing. If God came to me tonight and said, ‘Okay, your time’s up. You got to go home and I’m not a genie. I’m not giving you three wishes.’ One thing, what would it be?” I said, “I would infect every American was whatever it was that John Lewis got as a four year old kid and took through a lifetime to keep moving and keep moving in the right direction and keep bringing other people to move and to do it without hatred in his heart, with a song and be able to sing and dance.”

I thought it was interesting that Bill Clinton took those 2 words that are so conspicuous in present-day American culture —  "cancel" and "infect" — and turned it to the positive. We have a cancel culture — Bill was acknowledging — but if we were like John, we'd have love and we'd keep working on winning converts. And we have the awful infection — the coronavirus — but we could come down with an infection of joy and love and dedication to living together in a better world.