VOICES IT MATTERS
Once upon a time there was an emperor whose only interest in life was to dress up in fancy clothes so that people could admire him. A dishonest tailor told the emperor that he could sew a lovely new suit for him. It would be so light and fine that it would seem invisible. Only those who were stupid could not see it. The emperor was very excited and ordered the new tailor to begin the work.
Finally, the emperor’s new suit was ready. He could see nothing, but he too did not want to appear stupid. He admired the suit and thanked the tailor. He was asked to parade down the street for all to see the new clothes. The emperor paraded down the main street. The people could only see a naked emperor, but no one admitted it for fear of being thought stupid. They foolishly praised the invisible fabric. The emperor was very happy.
At last, a child cried out, “The emperor is naked!”
Soon everyone began to murmur the same thing and very soon all shouted, “The emperor is not wearing anything!” The emperor realized the truth but preferred to believe that his people were stupid. In reality, the emperor was butt naked, with no substance other than his pride in himself. The Truth is more complicated than what our generation usually perceives but it is that voice that sends a powerful statement.
In the end, it’s not about conformity or mimicry, but a leader that wears authentic clothes and delivers a message of visible truth.
(Adapted from Hans Christian Andersen The Emperor Has No Clothes)
There is good in the world and it is worth fighting for.
…some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
From Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam-A Time To Break Silence
I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear. It is a condition that comes from the lack of effective leadership in either the Legislative Branch or the Executive Branch of our Government.
That leadership is so lacking that serious and responsible proposals are being made that national advisory commissions be appointed to provide such critically needed leadership.
I speak as briefly as possible because too much harm has already been done with irresponsible words of bitterness and selfish political opportunism. I speak as briefly as possible because the issue is too great to be obscured by eloquence. I speak simply and briefly in the hope that my words will be taken to heart.
From: Margaret Chase Smith Declaration of Conscience 1950
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations — Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin — bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
From: Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel, 1999. 
Goodness is the deepest truth about the human story.
But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another; and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
From: Robert F. Kennedy – Remarks on the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. 1968
The contamination of the environment with harmful substances is one of the major problems of modern life. The world of air and water and soil supports not only the hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants, it supports man himself. In the past we have often chosen to ignore this fact. Now we are receiving sharp reminders that our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves. The problem you have chosen to explore is one that must be resolved in our time. I feel strongly that a beginning must be made on it now, — in this session of Congress. Contamination of various kinds has now invaded all of the physical environment that supports us — water, soil, air, and vegetation. It has even penetrated that internal environment within the bodies of animals and of men. It comes from many sources: radioactive wastes from reactors, laboratories and hospitals, fallout from nuclear explosions, domestic wastes from cities and towns; chemical wastes from factories, detergents from homes and industries.
From: Rachel Carson’s Statement before Congress 1963
A nation is formed by the willingness of each of us to share in the responsibility for upholding the common good. A government is invigorated when each one of us is willing to participate in shaping the future of this nation. In this election year, we must define the “common good“ and begin again to shape a common future. Let each person do his or her part. If one citizen is unwilling to participate, all of us are going to suffer. For the American idea, though it is shared by all of us, is realized in each one of us.
And now, what are those of us who are elected public officials supposed to do? We call ourselves “public servants” but I’ll tell you this: We as public servants must set an example for the rest of the nation. It is hypocritical for the public official to admonish and exhort the people to uphold the common good if we are derelict in upholding the common good. More is required — More is required of public officials than slogans and handshakes and press releases. More is required. We must hold ourselves strictly accountable. We must provide the people with a vision of the future.
Barbara Charline Jordan 1976 Democratic National Convention
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This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.
From: Franklin D. Roosevelt – First Inaugural Address – 1933
Humanity’s ability to inflict mass casualties suddenly entered a terrifying new era according to writer Lesley Blume.
“It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”
“We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”
President Harry S. Truman, August 6, 1945
Reporter Wilfred Burchett observed, “…was not just the end of World War II but the fate of cities all over the world in the first hours of a World War III”.
Scientist note that Chernobyl was a man-made disaster that distributed in the atmosphere some of the most dangerous substances known to man.
“Do you remember how it was in Tolstoy? Pierre Bezukhov is so shocked by the war, he thinks that he and the whole world have changed forever. But then some time passes, and he says to himself: “I’m going to keep yelling at the coach-driver just like before, I’m going to keep growling like before.” Then why do people remember? So that they can determine the truth? For fairness? So they can free themselves and forget? Is it because they understand they’re part of a grand event? Or are they looking into the past for cover? And all this despite the fact that memories are very fragile things, ephemeral things, this is not exact knowledge, but a guess that a person makes about himself. It isn’t even knowledge, it’s more like a set of emotions”
“Is there anything more frightening than people?” “I’m not afraid of God. I’m afraid of man.”
Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
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A journalist who investigated and publicized social and economic injustices by exposing corruption in big business and government wrote:
“…America differed from Russia in that its government existed under the form of a democracy. The officials who ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the one got the office which bought the most votes. Now and then, the election was very close, and that was the time the poor man came in.”
“He saw the world of civilization then more plainly than ever he had seen it before; a world in which nothing counted but brutal might, an order devised by those who possessed it for the subjugation of those who did not.”
“The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the know-ledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.”
“Can you not see that the task is your task – yours to dream, yours to resolve, yours to execute?”
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
A legal scholar pointing out problems with the expansive use of First Amendment rights pointed out….
“Surely a number of such people want to do the right thing, are well-intentioned, but just as surely some do not act from creditable intentions. Some of our elites…professors, journalists, makers of motion pictures and television entertainment,.…delight in nihilism and destruction as much as do the random killers in our cities. Their weapons are just different.”
I am suggesting that censorship be considered for the most violent and sexually explicit material now on offer, starting with the obscene prose and pictures available on the Internet, motion pictures that are mere rhapsodies to violence, and the more degenerate lyrics of rap music. Censorship is a subject that few people want to discuss, not because it has been tried and found dangerous or oppressive but because the ethos of modern liberalism has made any interference with the individual’s self-gratification seem shamefully reactionary.
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline
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“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute.
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.”
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
A Journalist impacted by Poverty and Immigration on the Mexican border observed:
“I am by nature a person suspicious of the economic machine that feeds me. And yet I am a captive of that economic machine, and my mind is structured by its lessons and demands. I consume its wealth with zest. I drive a truck, watch a color television, and write on a computer, but I cannot overcome the feeling that these objects and the industrial culture that produced them are temporary things, a kind of fat beast feeding on the bounty of the earth that will starve to death within the next century, or at least be severely diminished.”
“There will be no first hundred days for this future, there will be no five-year plans. There will be no program. Imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more. Imagine the problem is a future that terrifies us because we lose our machines but gain our feet and pounding hearts. Then what is to be done?”
“We are becoming more and more aware that our civilization destroys the foundations that support it by devouring the earth and the things of the earth, but we don’t have the courage to back away, to stop, to restrain ourselves. I know I don’t.”
The Writings of Charles Bowden
The first book to challenge the official American version on its “war on drugs” was Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, written over 20 years ago. Government proclamations claimed that a healthy capitalist society was fighting mafia crime on the border. Charles Bowden, an investigative reporter offered instead a dark but visionary description of how free trade policies were trapping Mexican workers into a cycle of exploitation by US companies in bonded factories along the borderline, thereby feeding the cartels with a recruitment pool born of poverty, desperation and gang violence. Bowden accused the Mexican army of being “the biggest drug cartel”.
Vivid and gruesome images described impoverished urban settlements, workers in foreign-owned factories, victims of drug and gang violence, the hardships of women and children, and other aspects of daily life for all but the privileged few.
Bowden claimed: “Thirty or forty years from now, the American adventures into the bowels of the Middle East will be forgotten details of a bumbling imperialism. But what…is taking place all along the line will profoundly alter the future of the United States. The comfortable way to deal with these stories is to say they are about them. The way to understand these stories is to say they are about us.”
The Writings of Charles Bowden
Haunted and disturbed by what was witnessed on the border between the US and Mexico, a reporter stated:
“I live in a time of fear and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror. The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse. This is the belief of my time. I do not share it. The numbers of people will rise, the pain of migration will grow, the seas will bark forth storms, the bombs will explode in the markets, and mouths fighting for a place at the table will grow, as will the shouting and shoving. That is a given. Once the given is accepted, fear is pointless. The fear comes from not accepting it, from turning aside one’s head, from dreaming in the fort of one’s home that such things cannot be. The fear comes from turning inward and seeking personal salvation. The bones must be properly buried, amends must be made. Also, the beasts must be acknowledged. And the weather faced, the winds and rains lashing the face, still, they must be faced. So too, the dry ground screaming for relief. There is an industry peddling solutions, and these solutions insist no one must really change, except perhaps a little, and without pain. This is the source of the fear, this refusal to accept the future that is already here.
“We think velocity is new, change is new, and this vast tumult and wave of fear is new. And we are wrong. There has never been firm ground for our lives and our only balm has been a forgetfulness of the changes we have endured.”
The Writings of Charles Bowden