Being arrested at the state capitol in Raleigh yesterday evening and then transported and “processed” at the Wake County jail was a kind of circular experience for me – at several levels, as I think about it.

First, the 84 of us who were kindly and professionally handcuffed and hauled off from yesterday’s sixth Moral Monday demonstration had it happen to us in the circular rotunda outside the chambers of the General Assembly, a place that has magnificent acoustics, incidentally, which helped our singing of the great hymns and freedom songs of the Civil Rights era and helped me circle back emotionally to the 1960’s.

I never got arrested back then as a result of any of my protestations in support of either civil rights or an end to the war in Vietnam but came close (I guess I did; I don’t know for sure) when Fred Wood and I led (led, only because I was the tallest guy in the group and Fred had a great beard) a big group of students and faculty from Pittsburgh Seminary, Pitt, Carnegie-Mellon (Carnegie Tech, at the time), and elsewhere on a march from East Liberty to Frick Park in Oakland in the fall of 1964, in sympathy with civil rights marchers in the South who were risking a whole lot more than we were. We didn’t get arrested, but we did get cursed and spat upon, and the Pittsburgh city police acted fully professionally and kept complete order, as did the NC General Assembly and City of Raleigh police last night. So my mind circled back.

Second, there was a concentric-but-narrower circular emotion for me. Last October, Alice and I did door-to-door voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigning in rural neighborhoods here in northwestern Orange County, where we live. The level of poverty that we saw was surprising to us since Orange County, which includes Chapel Hill and Hillsborough, is the wealthiest county, per capita, in the state.

In one instance, the poverty was downright shocking and frightening. One of the homes we were assigned to visit that afternoon was perhaps the most dilapidated-but-still-occupied house I have ever seen. It was a two-story farm house occupied now by an elderly African American woman and her even more elderly disabled husband on property inherited from ancestors who had been freed from slavery by their owners and given the small farm just before the Civil War.

As we pulled into the lane leading up to the house, we could see the glass was broken out of the windows on both stories at one end, and the front porch and porch roof had fallen-in at that end. At the other end of the home, the kitchen end, a newer deck and wheelchair ramp had been constructed by one of the elderly couple’s children so that her husband could more easily get in and out of the house when he had to be taken to medical appointments.

It was the Sunday before Election Day, and when I knocked at the kitchen door for the purpose of arranging rides for them to their polling place on Tuesday, the kind and gentle woman who answered said that wouldn’t be necessary; her daughter would be taking her and her husband had voted earlier by mail.

Yesterday afternoon as we stood on the Bicentennial Mall lawn and listened to a number of super-eloquent speakers from the NAACP and elsewhere make the case for the Moral Mondays movement (which this week will be expanded to include Wednesdays as well from here on, I’m told), my mind circled back to that October conversation.

Among the absurdities that the Legislature is seriously considering in order to make up the for the financial loss it will suffer by being one of the 12 states refusing to be a willing partner in the federal Affordable Health Care plan, i.e., “Obamacare,” is to add groceries to the sales tax list here. Which means: the elderly woman we met that day and her husband, whose refrigerator and pantry are stocked pretty minimally, I’m pretty sure, will be taxed even more heavily while another proposal the legislature is also considering will lower the state income tax rate for the wealthiest North Carolinians.

All of it in the interest of “fairness” and of “fiscal responsibility,” they say!

Huh? That’s crazy-talk, as is the proposal in this very same legislative session to require people to show official identification, which is to say, a driver’s license, when they show up to vote. Neither the woman we met that Sunday afternoon last October nor her husband has had a driver’s licenses or owned a vehicle in years. Nor, I suspect, will they be easily able to provide alternative “proof” that they live at the same Orange County, NC address where one of them has lived all her life, that her ancestors go further back in this country than those of most of the rest of us, and that they both have the right to vote now – the “right” that was hard won for them only in the 1960’s, sad to say.

So, life and memory are circular, I guess, at least kind of, which maybe was what led me to decide to join the folks moving “illegally” into the capitol rotunda last night. (Officially, we were gently and professionally arrested for “failure to disburse on command,” “second degree trespass,” and “violation of legislative building.)

Then again, life and history really aren’t circular, and we aren’t bound always to repeat ourselves. Rather, history is more funnel-like (an apt metaphor when there were also tornadoes in the area last night, they tell me). We do go around in circles, but we also move forward and upward at the same time. (Teilhard de Chardin?)

Which gives me confidence that things can change and will. Things really aren’t the same as they were in the 1960’s…or even just last year…or even just yesterday, for that matter. Are they? Not even legislatures with all their blustering crazy talk will hold things back — which probably is why Alice and I will go back next Monday (and maybe even tomorrow) to support and applaud other folks who are also willing to be handcuffed but not stopped from moving forward…ever. It’s not much of a risk and probably a good investment.