Politics & Power Quote by Dick Gregory

Gregory gives you the soft landing first: America is a forest, dense with "evils and faults", but not so airless that light can’t get in. Then he yanks the comfort away. The sun is visible, yes, but its meaning is undecided. Rising or setting turns optimism into a wager, not a default setting.

As a comedian who built a career out of making white audiences laugh and then squirm, Gregory knows the power of a hopeful image that doubles as an indictment. "Reach through the forest" is doing heavy work: it suggests effort, obstruction, and the fact that clarity isn’t granted, it’s fought for. You don’t stroll into justice; you push branches aside. That verb choice quietly assigns responsibility to the listener, not the government, not history.

The sun itself is an American cliché - the promised dawn, the endless frontier, the country forever "becoming". Gregory keeps the cliché but flips it into a diagnostic tool. If you can’t tell sunrise from sunset, you’re living in a nation that confuses progress with motion. Things can change and still be getting worse; the point is not that time passes, but that direction matters.

The context is Gregory’s lifetime: Jim Crow, civil rights, assassinations, Vietnam, Nixon, the backlash years. He’s speaking from inside the experiment, not outside it. The line doesn’t ask for patriotism or cynicism; it asks for vigilance, because the light you see might be the last light.