How a line of monks exposes the moral weather of America today
They came walking as if the world had not yet taught them to hurry.
The monks moved in single file, robes brushing the winter air, each step a soft rebuttal to the nation’s rising clamor. Their silence is not retreat. It is testimony. In a country vibrating with fear, raids, and the cold machinery of federal power, their calm feels like a counterargument written in human form. They walk with the unbothered rhythm of people who know that truth does not need amplification to be heard.
America, meanwhile, is loud, loud with suspicion, loud with enforcement, loud with the grinding gears of a government that too often forgets the people inside its policies. Yet these monks walk as if to say: Noise is not authority. Stillness is not surrender. Their presence does not quiet the storm; it reveals it.
When the monks walked out of the Huong Dao Buddhist Temple/Vipassana Bhavana in Fort Worth, Texas, on October 26, 2025, on foot en route to Washington, D. C., few could see the storm brewing in America. Perhaps the monks sensed that America was a powder keg, ripe for explosion and in need of a cooling-off period.
Across the country, ICE operations have grown into a symbol of a government leaning heavily on its power. Families awakened by pounding on doors. Citizens detained because their paperwork was questioned. Long-time residents swept into a system that moves faster than the truth can catch up.
The official language is always the same: “procedures,” “protocols,” “enforcement actions.” But beneath the bureaucratic phrasing lies a simple reality. Fear has become a governing tool. Keep the populace in fear, stress out, full of worry and concern, then willy nilly govern at your pleasure.
Into this atmosphere stepped the monks, unarmed and unafraid. Their walk is not a traditional protest. They do not chant. They do not carry signs. They do not demand anything. They moved through the nation like a slow-moving mirror, reflecting the moral cost of our choices.
Their silence asked a question the country has been avoiding: What kind of nation requires this kind of walk?
This question becomes all the more important when one realizes that we are two Americas, side by side. Neither resembles the other.
As a journalist, I might describe the scene in terms of contrast: On one side, federal agents in dark uniforms, radios crackling, vehicles idling, tear gas smoke filling the air, the choreography of state power on full display. On the other, monks in saffron robes, hands folded, eyes lowered, their only weapon the steadiness of their breath.
A prophet like Isaiah or Jeremiah would frame it differently: One America is ruled by fear. The other is ruled by memory — the memory of who we said we were, and who we still might become.
A poet like James Baldwin would see the contrast in color and motion: the sharp lines of enforcement against the soft geometry of devotion; the clipped urgency of command against the unhurried cadence of prayer.
Both Americas are real. Only one, Baldwin would urge, is sustainable.
Baldwin taught me to bear witness and to speak of an American, “No better than I have seen.”
I have lived long enough to recognize this moment. I have seen federal power used to protect me on the first day of integrating the Lanier Jr. High School for Boys in Macon, Georgia, and I have seen it used to intimidate me as a criminal defense lawyer representing my clients in Hancock County, Georgia, and Butts County, Georgia.
On his 95th birthday at the close of the last decade, I asked Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Rev. C. T. Vivian, who had lived so long, what he thought of the Black Lives Matter protests. Vivian answered, “The kids blow it. They had the government in the palm of their hands until the rioting and looting started.”
I have watched peaceful walkers before — in Birmingham, where I marched not with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but with Jesse Jackson, in Fort Valley, Georgia where I marched with Hosea Williams, in Macon, Georgia, where I marched with Dr. Joseph E. Lowery, and in the long shadow of Tuskegee with people who carried the moral weight of a nation on their shoulders simply by refusing to move in anger.
The monks remind me of that lineage. They are not marching against ICE. They are marching for the soul of the country.
Their walk calls forth memories of earlier reckonings, when ordinary people stepped into the streets not because they were strong, but because they were right. And like those earlier walkers, the monks understand something essential: that moral authority does not shout. It stands. It walks. It endures.
We are twittering on the prophetic edge with full knowledge that prophets do not predict the future; they diagnose the present. And the diagnosis is clear: A nation that treats its people as threats will eventually become a threat to itself.
The monks’ walk exposes the spiritual cost of our policies. It reveals how easily a government can drift from protection to punishment, from order to oppression, from vigilance to fear. Their silence is not passive; it is surgical. It cuts through the noise and lays bare the truth:
We are living in a time when compassion is treated as naïveté and enforcement as virtue.
But the monks insist on another reading of the moment. Their walk says: A nation is not measured by the strength of its borders, but by the breadth of its humanity.
Here is what their walk reveals about us:
In the end, the monks do not indict America with words. They indict America with presence.
Their silence becomes a mirror. Their calm becomes an indictment. Their steps become a prayer for a country that has lost its way.
They remind us that the measure of a nation is not how it treats the powerful, but how it treats the vulnerable. They remind us that dignity is not a privilege to be granted, but a birthright to be honored. They remind us that fear is a poor architect for a democratic home.
And perhaps the most urgent reminder is this:
The monks do not come to condemn America. They come to remind America of the promise it once made to itself — that dignity is not negotiable, and humanity is not optional.
As the heathens rage with long guns drawn in the snowy streets of Minneapolis, the monks walk up the eastern seaboard, offering an interesting contrast. Their walk is not a protest to the violence they know is happening in America. It is a prophecy. A quiet one, yes, but “quiet things have always had a way of outlasting storms,” wisdom according to C. T. Vivian.
Excellent piece on the monks. My grandchildren went to see them in Decatur and Gwinnett counties.
Thank you. I saw them in Fayetteville. They are very inspirational.