Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Let Us Now Praise an Infamous Woman – and Our Own Possibilities

Let Us Now Praise an Infamous Woman – and Our Own Possibilities 
 
by Norman Solomon 
The problem with letting history judge is that so many officials get away
with murder in the meantime – while precious few choose to face protracted
vilification for pursuing truth and peace.
A grand total of two people in the entire Congress were able to resist a
blood-drenched blank check for the Vietnam War. Standing alone on Aug. 7,
1964, Senators Ernest Gruening and Wayne Morse voted against the Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution.
Forty-three years later, we don't need to go back decades to find a
lopsided instance of a lone voice on Capitol Hill standing against war
hysteria and the expediency of violent fear. Days after 9/11, at the
launch of the so-called "war on terrorism," just one lawmaker – out of 535
– cast a vote against the gathering madness.
"However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of
restraint," she said on the floor of the House of Representatives. The
date was Sept. 14, 2001.
She went on: "Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say,
Let's step back for a moment, let's just pause just for a minute, and
think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not
spiral out of control."
And, she said: "As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore."
With all that has happened since then – with all that has spun out of
control, with all the ways that the U.S. government has mimicked the evil
it deplores – it's stunning to watch and hear, for a single minute, what
this brave congresswoman had to say. 
After speaking those words, Rep. Barbara Lee voted no. And the fevered
slanders began immediately. She was called a traitor. Pundits went crazy.
Death threats came.
Barbara Lee kept on keeping on. And nearly six years later, she's a key
leader of antiwar forces inside and outside Congress. In her own way, she
is a political descendent of Sen. Morse, whose denunciations of the
Vietnam War are equally inspiring to watch today. 
The pretexts for starting the wars on Vietnam and Iraq preceded the
pretexts for continuing them. While antiwar activism took hold and public
opinion shifted against the war effort, the Congress lagged way behind.
Today, the need for a cutoff of war funding remains unfulfilled. To watch
rarely seen footage of Wayne Morse and Barbara Lee is to see a standard of
decency that few of our purported representatives in Congress are meeting.
There's no point in waiting for members of Congress to be heroic. When
we're blessed with the living examples of a few genuine visionaries in
office, they should inspire us to realize our own possibilities.
Ultimately, our own actions – and inaction – are at issue.
"Incontestably, alas," James Baldwin wrote a few years after the killing
of Martin Luther King Jr., while the war in Vietnam still raged, "most
people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is
an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they
are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they've become.
This is not very different from the act of faith demanded by all those
marches and petitions while Martin was still alive. One could scarcely be
deluded by Americans anymore, one scarcely dared expect anything from the
great, vast, blank generality; and yet one was compelled to demand of
Americans – and for their sakes, after all – a generosity, a clarity, and
a nobility which they did not dream of demanding of themselves. … Perhaps,
however, the moral of the story (and the hope of the world) lies in what
one demands, not of others, but of oneself."
 
-- 
visitate 
http://www.comunisti-italiani.it/frames/index.htm
 
http://www.italia-cuba.it/associazione/associazione.htm
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it













-- 
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
