JAVIER M. PEREZ, JR., INTERNATIONAL EXEC. VICE PRESIDENT
VOTE: ‘We just might save our country and our souls’ A song by the band “Chicago,” and an address delivered by historian John Meacham to the Democratic National Convention, spoke to me as I reflected on the importance of the coming American election. I thought they might prove meaningful to you as well:
‘Dialogue Part 1 & 2’
history. And, we shouldn’t want to.
– Chicago, 1972
For many of us have been given much: liberty, opportunity, a sense of possibility. The task of our time is to make sure those gifts are available not to just folks who look like me, but to all of us.
Are you optimistic ’bout the way that things are going? No, I never think of it at all. Don’t you worry when you see what’s going down? No, I try to mind my business and that is no business at all. When it’s time to function as a feeling human being, will your Bachelor of Arts help you get by? I hope to study further a few more years or so and to keep a steady high. Will you try and change things with the power that you have, the power of a million new ideas? What is this power you speak of and this need for things to change? I always thought that everything was fine. Don’t you feel repression closing in around? No, the campus here is very, very free. Does it make you angry the way war is dragging on? I hope the President knows what he’s into. I don’t know. Don’t you ever see the starvation in the city where you live, all the needless hunger, all the needless pain? I haven’t been there lately, the country is so fine, I haven’t got the time. Thank you for the talk you really eased my mind. Well if you had my outlook your feeling would be numb, you’d always think everything was fine.
This is a grave moment in America. A deadly virus is ravaging us. Our jobs are evaporating. … Our democracy is under assault from an incumbent more interested in himself than he is in the rest of us. Extremism, nativism, isolationism and a lack of economic opportunity for working people are all preventing us from realizing our nation’s promise. And so, we must decide whether we will continue to be prisoners of the darkest of American forces or will we free ourselves to write a brighter, better, nobler story. That’s the issue of this election – a choice that goes straight to the nature of the soul of America. … The soul is what makes us us. In its finest hours America’s soul has been animated by the proposition that we are all created equal … Yet, America is a mix of light and shadow, Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall, dwell in the American soul, but so do the impulses that have given us slavery, segregation, and systematic discrimination. …
Excerpts, 2020 Democratic National Convention
Yet, history, which will surely be our judge, can also be our guide. … Our story has become fuller and fairer because of people who share a conviction that Dr. King articulated on that Sunday, half a century ago: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
In his final Sunday sermon, days before his death, Martin Luther King Jr., said, “We are tied together in a single garment of destiny.” … We the people cannot escape that reality. Nor, as Lincoln taught us, can you and I escape
Bending that ark requires all of us. … With our voices and our votes, let us now write the next chapter of the American story – one of hope, of love, of justice. If we do so, we might just save our country – and our souls. v
Address by Jon Meacham
IN TRANSIT
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