(adapted from a poem by Marian Wright Edelman)
LORD, I cannot preach like Martin Luther King, Jr.
or turn a poetic phrase like Shakespeare
but I care and am willing to serve.
I do not have General Patton's and
George Washington's courage
or Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt's political skills
but I care and am willing to serve.
I cannot sing like Frank Sinatra
or organize like Susan B. Anthony
but I care and am willing to serve.
I am not holy like Pope John Paul or the Dalai Lama,
forgiving like Mandela, or disciplined like Gandhi
but I care and am willing to serve.
I am not brilliant like Einstein
or Ben Franklin,
or as eloquent as John F. Kennedy or Barbara Jordan
but I care and am willing to serve.
I have not Mother Teresa's saintliness,
Dorothy Day's love or
Lou Gherig's gentle tough spirit
but I care and am willing to serve.
God, it may not seem as easy as the 60s
to frame an issue and forge a solution
but I care and am willing to serve.
My mind and body are not so swift as in youth
and my energy comes in spurts
but I care and am willing to serve.
I'm so young
nobody will listen
I'm not sure what to say or do
but I care and am willing to serve.
I can't see or hear well
speak good English, stutter sometimes
and get real scared standing up before others
but I care and am willing to serve.
Use me as Thou will to save Thy children today and tomorrow
and to build a nation and world where no
child is left behind, everyone feels welcome,
and we fight for democracy
and the ideals and values
this great nation was founded upon.
This is from a poem, "A Prayer for Each of Us to Serve," written by Marian Wright Edelman. I adapted it with additional sentiments and the names of individuals who were personally resonant for me. Marian Wright Edelman is the founder of the Children's Defense Fund, whose site you can find here.
The tradition of protest and opposition to wrongheaded policies is alive and well in America. The irony of it all is that this bastion of democracy is being practiced by mostly non-citizens!! The hundreds of thousands of illegal and allegedly legal immigrants demonstrating on our city streets are only a testament to the apathy and lack of cohesive strength of the American People.
Gas prices are insanely high and getting higher. George Bush and his Oil Cronies are a criminal cabal making outrageous profits on the backs of hard working, poorly paid Americans. Why is there not thousands if not millions of people in the streets protesting for an end to price gouging and highway robbery. It's also the States that keep raising the gas tax whenever there’s a shortfall from their overzealous spending. That applies to Repukelicans and Democrites alike..
Of course Mass Transit could provide an alternative to driving the car to work every morning and spending $100 plus a week just to get there but no that's never going to be allowed to happen. Service is purposely made horrible, inconvenient and lacking in even the most basic amenities. The Auto and Oil industries would not let us have a viable alternative to their gas guzzling, salary depleting machines.
Americans don't seem to care though and continue to fill up and drive off. We want bigger, more expensive cars we can't afford and we sacrifice the welfare of ourselves, our families and all the other things that would make life special to feed this beast in the garage or at the curb. Why aren't we upset enough to have the spirit of these immigrants? Please, someone tell me.
Dear Ms. Colgan, I am giving you heads up on the action that I will be taking , if President Bush fails to come forward and announce that the citizens of this nation will be allow to vote on two citizen's issues and others that I am posting here for you and the world to read. I have posted something like this already. He will recieve it via email on the 7th of June and via snail mail about the same date. Here is the letter now ma'am; I ask you to let me know what you think and anyone else by email.
Dear President George Bush,
I refer to you as this, since as of twelve noon today on this day the seventh of June of the year two thousand and six terminate yours and all elected federal officials plus the justices that either heard or refused to hear the Ms. Terri Schiavo’s case. I do this under the original ten amendments of the United States Constitution, since they are the only ones that have any bearing on this termination of all these people. All these people failed to uphold the United States Constitution when you all failed to enforce what this nations “government” stated that would end this in the eyes of the courts in years past.
I also terminate your elected position as well as, Vice President Richard Cheney, Senators Obama, Senator Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer both of New York, as well as Congressman Brain Higgins for failure to allow the citizens the right to decide what are citizen’s rights issues by a vote that I requested and demanded of this so-called government on the Roe vs. Wade decision and The Eminent Domain decisions of The United States Supreme Court. I have brought into question the constitutional question of these decisions and have requested and demanded that these issues get final resolve by having them brought to the people of this nation in a vote that is guaranteed under the United States Constitution when a citizen or citizen’s deemed it necessary to do so. You all have failed to allow for this vote, so this nation will on July fourth of two thousand and seven elect a new “government to represent us as a nation, since you are now being declared by these failures to uphold the United States Constitution “Domestic Enemies of The United States Constitution, as of which terminates your terms as of this time.
I enact this right under The United States Constitution (the original part of this document) that the writers of this document did not state that an elected official “MUST” full fill this their elected term. They only stated how long a term will be for and this is all. Their intent (unless this government can show otherwise) was that if a citizen or citizen’s of this nation may terminate any elected official if they fail to uphold what they swear to uphold, which this government now has done in both these allegations.
Their intent was (again unless this government can prove otherwise in the original ten amendments) that the citizen’s of this nation are the only ones with the power to decide on citizen rights issues, such as these two issues are clearly.
Unless any federal official can show any television or radio footage of them request of Mr. Schiavo as to produce a “Living Will” to allow Ms. Terri Schiavo to have the right to die, then all are terminated for their failure to uphold her right to life according to The United States Constitution, which every citizen has this right, as well. I am taking this action for her behalf, as well as my own behalf.
The people of this nation is truly the real government and it is time to show this entity that the writers of The United States Constitution that we are and that they are just representatives of us and that they can be terminated before their elected terms are finished. The United States Constitution is for a democracy and not a socialist government as this entity is turning into.
In this “Special National Vote” which it is called we will also decided a few other issues and set standards that this entity will abide by. These issues will be:
1. When will the right to life to be enforced as well as what will end “in the eyes of the court” the right to die? Will it be “he says/she says” as it is right now or will we enforce what the “government” in the past said it will be that a “living Will” be produced to settle it in all courts of this nation?
2. We will decide as to what manner a citizen will be sentence to die, if they do not state otherwise in their “Living Will”? We will decide how a judge may sentence a person to be starved or will they sentence them to lethal injection?
3. We will decide as a nation when life begins is it at conception or at birth?
4. We will decide as a nation what a valued life is? We will do it in the proper way unlike The United States Supreme Court did in their decision. This should have and now will be done by “ALL” American citizens instead of just nine citizens.
5. We will decide as to whether “ALL” candidates after an election (national election) will continue to keep campaign contributions or will they turn it over to the “government” to go towards the Nation debt and after this (if ever) paid off will be split equally to all federal agencies to help them besides what we pay in taxes? We are the ones who give them this money to run, so we will decide what will happen to it after the election by making this law.
6. We (as a nation) will decide whether the government will get a pay increase or not? If this is passed it will be done on every “Presidential Election” and it will list one to ten percent increase or just straight out no. We as citizens since we pay their wages we “ALL” have the right to vote on any increase of the elected officials.
Until this vote is done “all” federal agencies on the first of October will receive what they received according to the two thousand and six budgets. They will not be able to seek any increase until the newly elected government is in place.
So in closing, I, Thomas L. Coats, do now terminate all of the elected officials and all appointed officials that this affects.
Signed this date seventh of June two thousand and six by myself as an American citizen. So, this government will either prove that the constitution allows them to violate it without repercussion to keep their “jobs” or they will leave in disgrace as “Domestic Enemies of The United States Constitution”! They will not be able to get this nation to pay for their moves back to their home states, because of them leaving the way they are “in disgrace”.
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Posted by: Cheap alprazolam at August 5, 2006 03:03 PMAs I heard this yesterday I was moved as I have very rarely been moved. I wished everyone could hear it and now thanks to the miracle of the interenet it is available at
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12131617/#060830b
and reprinted below
Aug. 30, 2006 | 8:34 p.m. ET
Feeling morally, intellectually confused?
The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.
Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.
Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday demands the deep analysis—and the sober contemplation—of every American.
For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence -- indeed, the loyalty -- of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land. Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants -- our employees -- with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration’s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.
Dissent and disagreement with government is the life’s blood of human freedom; and not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as “his” troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.
It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile it is right and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.
In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld’s speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For in their time, there was another government faced with true peril—with a growing evil—powerful and remorseless.
That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the “secret information.” It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld’s -- questioning their intellect and their morality.
That government was England’s, in the 1930’s.
It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone England.
It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.
It knew that the hard evidence it received, which contradicted its own policies, its own conclusions — its own omniscience -- needed to be dismissed.
The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.
Most relevant of all — it “knew” that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile, at best morally or intellectually confused.
That critic’s name was Winston Churchill.
Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.
History — and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England — have taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty — and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.
Thus, did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy.
Excepting the fact, that he has the battery plugged in backwards.
His government, absolute -- and exclusive -- in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis.
It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.
But back to today’s Omniscient ones.
That, about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely.
And, as such, all voices count -- not just his.
Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience — about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one year ago — we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their “omniscience” as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.
But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.
Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have — inadvertently or intentionally — profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.
And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer’s New Clothes?
In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?
The confusion we -- as its citizens— must now address, is stark and forbidding.
But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note -- with hope in your heart — that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light, and we can, too.
The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.
And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a “new type of fascism.”
As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that -- though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.
This country faces a new type of fascism - indeed.
Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute, I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow.
But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could I come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed: “confused” or “immoral.”
Thus, forgive me, for reading Murrow, in full:
“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” he said, in 1954. “We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.
“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.”
And so good night, and good luck.
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