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Congressman John Lewis Stands Up Against Iraq War
Here
is John Lewis speaking as an elected member of the House
of Representatives from Georgia, on March 20, 2007
I
cannot in good conscience vote for another dollar or
another dime to support this war.
Mr. Speaker, I rise
with deep concern that on this very day 4 years ago, our
Nation inaugurated a conflict, an unnecessary war, a war
of choice, not a necessity.
The most comprehensive intelligence we have, the
National Intelligence Estimate and the latest Pentagon
report, tells us that Iraq had descended into a state of
civil war. Over 3,000 Americans have died, and hundreds
of thousands, some even say up to 1 million citizens of
Iraq, have lost their lives in this unnecessary
conflict.
And while we are telling our veterans of this war, the
elderly, the poor, and the sick that there is no room in
the budget for them, the American people have spent over
$400 billion on a failed policy. We cannot do more of
the same. Mr. Speaker, violence begets violence. It does
not lead to peace.
President John F. Kennedy once said, ``Those who make
peaceful revolution impossible will make violent
revolution inevitable.'' My greatest fear is that the
young people of Iraq and of the Middle East will never
forget this war. My greatest fear is they will grow up
hating our children and our children's children for what
we have done. Mr. Speaker, the Bible is right. Even a
great nation can reap what it sows.
Nothing troubles me more than to see the young faces of
these soldiers who have been led to their death.
Some are only 18, 19, 21, 22, 23. It is painful; it is
so painful to watch. Sometimes I feel like crying and
crying out loud at what we are doing as a Nation and
what this administration is doing in our name. Our
children do not deserve to die as pawns in a civil war.
They do not deserve to pay with their lives for the
mistakes of this administration. They never had a
chance.
When I was their age, when I was 23 years old, I was
leading the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee,
soon to speak in Washington on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial, but then we were involved in a nonviolent
revolution to transform the soul of America, to create a
beloved community.
Forty years ago, I was there in New York City in
Riverside Church when
Martin Luther King, Jr., gave one of the most
powerful speeches he ever made against the war in
Vietnam. If he could speak today, he would say this
Nation needs a revolution of values that exposes the
truth that war does not work. If he could speak today,
he would say that war is obsolete as a tool of our
foreign policy.
He would say there is nothing keeping us from changing
our national priority so that the pursuit of peace can
take precedence over the pursuit of war.
He would say we must remove the causes of chaos,
injustice, poverty and insecurity that are breeding
grounds for terrorism. This is the way towards peace.
As a Nation, can we hear the words of Gandhi, so simple,
so true, that it is either nonviolence or nonexistence?
Can we hear the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., saying
that we must learn to live together as brothers and
sisters or perish as fools?
Tonight I must make it plain and clear that as a human
being, as a citizen of the world, as a citizen of
America, as a Member of Congress, as an individual
committed to a world at peace with itself, I will not
and I cannot in good conscience vote for another dollar
or another dime to support this war.
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John Robert
Lewis (born February 21, 1940) is the
U.S. Representative for
Georgia's 5th congressional district, serving since
1987. He was a leader in the
American Civil Rights Movement and chairman of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
playing a key role in the struggle to end
segregation. He is a member of the
Democratic Party and is one of the most
liberal legislators.
Born in
Troy, Alabama, the third son of Eddie and Willie Mae
Lewis. His parents were
sharecroppers. Lewis was educated at the Pike County
Training High School,
Brundidge, Alabama and also
American Baptist Theological Seminary and at
Fisk University, both in
Nashville, Tennessee, where he became active in the
local
sit-in movement. As a student he made a systematic
study of the techniques and philosophy of
nonviolence, and with his fellow students prepared
thoroughly for their first actions. He participated in
the
Freedom Rides to desegregate the South, and was a
national leader in the struggle for civil rights. In an
interview John Lewis said "I saw racial discrimination
as a young child. I saw those signs that said "White
Men, Colored Men, White Women, Colored Women."..."I
remember as a young child with some of my brothers and
sisters and first cousins going down to the public
library trying to get library cards, trying to check
some books out, and we were told by the librarian that
the library was for whites only and not for "coloreds."
John Lewis followed
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and
Rosa Parks on the radio. He and his family supported
the Montgomery bus boycott. . . .
The Washington Post described Lewis in 1998 as "a
fiercely partisan Democrat but ... also fiercely
independent." Lewis described himself as a strong and
adamant
liberal. In 2006,
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said Lewis was
"often ranked as having the 10th-most liberal voting
record in Congress." Lewis was also described as the
"only former major civil rights leader who extended his
fight for human rights and racial reconciliation to the
halls of Congress." For "those who know him, from U.S.
senators to 20-something congressional aides" they refer
to him as the "conscience of Congress.". Lewis has cited
former Florida Senator and Congressman
Claude Pepper, a staunch liberal, as being the
colleague that he has most admired. Lewis has spoken out
in support of
gay rights and
national health insurance, and he has worked with
the
Faith and Politics Institute to advance their goals.
Lewis opposed the
U.S. waging of the 1991
Gulf War,
NAFTA, and the 2000 trade agreement that passed the
House with China. Lewis opposed the
Clinton administration on NAFTA and
welfare reform. After welfare reform passed, Lewis
was described as outraged; he said, "Where is the sense
of decency? What does it profit a great nation to
conquer the world, only to lose its soul?" In 1994, when
Clinton was considering invading Haiti, Lewis, in
contrast to the Congressional Black Caucus, opposed
armed intervention. When Clinton did send troops to
Haiti, Lewis rallied 'round the flag, called for
supporting the troops and called the intervention a
"mission of peace." In 1998, when Clinton was
considering a military strike against Iraq, Lewis said
he would back the president if American forces were
ordered into action. In 2001, three days after the
September 11 attacks, Lewis voted to give Bush
authority to retaliate in a vote that was 420–1; Lewis
called it probably one of his toughest votes. In 2002,
he sponsored the Peace Tax Fund bill, a
conscientious objection to military taxation
initiative that had been reintroduced yearly since 1972.
Lewis was a "fierce partisan critic of President Bush"
and the Iraq war. The
Associated Press said he was "the first major House
figure to suggest
impeaching
George W. Bush," arguing that the president
"deliberately, systematically violated the law" in
authorizing the
National Security Agency to
conduct wiretaps without a warrant. Lewis said, "He
is not King, he is president."
Lewis draws on his
historical involvement in the
civil rights movement as part of his politics. He
"makes an annual pilgrimage to Alabama to retrace the
route he marched in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery—a
route Lewis has since had declared part of the
Historic National Trails program. That trip has
become one of the hottest tickets in Washington among
lawmakers, Republican and Democrat, eager to associate
themselves with Lewis and the movement. 'We don't
deliberately set out to win votes, but it's very
helpful,' Lewis said of the trip."— Wikipedia
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The Shadows of Youth
The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights
Generation
By Andrew B. Lewis
With deep admiration and rigorous
scholarship, historian Lewis (Gonna
Sit at the Welcome Table) revisits
the ragtag band of young men and women who
formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee. Impatient with what they
considered the overly cautious and
accommodating pace of the NAACP and
Martin
Luther King Jr., the black college
students and their white allies, inspired by
Gandhi's principles of nonviolence and moral
integrity, risked their lives to challenge a
deeply entrenched system. Fanning out over
the Jim Crow South, SNCC organized sit-ins,
voter registration drives, Freedom Schools
and protest marches. Despite early
successes, the movement disintegrated in the
late 1960s, succeeded by the militant Black
Power movement. The highly readable history
follows the later careers of the principal
leaders. Some, like
Stokely Carmichael and
H. Rap Brown,
became bitter and disillusioned. Others,
including
Marion Barry,
Julian Bond and
John Lewis, tempered their idealism and
moved from protest to politics, assuming
positions of leadership within the very
institutions they had challenged. According
to the author, No organization contributed
more to the civil rights movement than SNCC,
and with his eloquent book, he offers a
deserved tribute.—Publishers
Weekly |
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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update 5
October 2011
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