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Forum Post: Hear the clarion call and keep on going!

Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 16, 2011, 7:52 p.m. EST by iwastherein68 (0)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

In the 60's, we protested an unjust war in southeast Asia and the injustices at home of prejudice, poverty and apathy.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. However, we had something then that has yet to emerge today - extraordinary leaders whose words gave us both spirit and purpose.

They were taken from us much too soon, but their words still resound. Hopefully, this movement will derive strength and guidance from such words, particularly from the Tribune of the Underclass -ie, the 99% - Robert F. Kennedy.

This is from his speech to the Cleveland City Club the day after MLK was killed:

"For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

"This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

"Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens.

"We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others."

And of course, from his famous Day of Affirmation speech, let this be the clarion call of today:

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

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