This one goes out to all the rebels…the renegades, the outcasts….the iconoclasts, the trail blazers, the visionaries and those we thought had lost their way…only to find that they had gone out so far in advance of us, sometimes to the good and sometimes to the bad, that they had to come back to get us….
This one goes out to the individuals…those who stood up, who stood out, who refused to sit still or sit down and who paid the price for that…sometimes in blood, sometimes in dollars, sometimes with years in a prison cell, sometimes with life itself.
This one goes out to the whistle blowers, the contrarians, the prophets raging in the wilderness and the protestors chanting in the street….those who cannot brook hypocrisy and the abuse of power…those who are pure of heart…
There’s time for essays about many things…there’s time for essays about commonality, coming together and towing the line….there’s a time for essays about people who never made mistakes or had flaws…but this essay is about the ones who stood out, alone, against the grain…the ones who put themselves on the line, because they walked the line.
This essay is about those who taught all of us about authenticity, about the limits of human endeavour, about courage, about failure…who, in pushing those limits, who, in living their lives, taught us about life itself…
I can only speak for myself, but I know I speak for all of us when I say:
This one goes out to you Cindy Sheehan, a patriot, an American hero, a mom…who in standing out in the Texas heat, is standing up for all of us…who, in asking simple questions of our President…out of her grief and her conviction…has forced this nation to ask itself: why are we in Iraq?
A shout out to you Cindy…you’ve joined this list of heroes. May you find the justice you hunger for; may your protest help bring us peace.
A shout out for Mario Savio, for Emma Goldman, for Eugene Debs, for Dorothy Day…a shout out for Sojourner Truth, for Harriet Tubman, for Frederick Douglass, for Tatanka Iyotanka, Chief Joseph and Henry David Thoreau…a shout out for Dom Helder Camara, for Thomas Merton, for Cesar Chavez…
A moment to honor Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama….
A quiet salute to the unnamed, unremembered workers who fought to make a living wage and worker’s rights their legacy and left their mark on history with the names of their strikes: the Homestead, the Pullman, the Bread and Roses and in San Francisco, in Minneapolis and in Flint where they proved they were truly the Salt of the Earth…
A tip of the hat to I.F. Stone, to C. Wright Mills, to Walter Rodney, to Dorothea Lange and to Michael Harrington…you are not forgotten…
A moment of recognition to acknowledge Marion Anderson, Rosa Parks, Betty Shabazz, Claudette Colvin and Coretta Scott King….a pause to honor Ella Baker, Robert Moses, John Lewis, Medgar Evars and Diane Neel…and yes, while we remember Martin and Malcolm…
this one is for Fannie Lou Hamer….
Call this a moment to consider the legacy of Paul Wellstone, of Robert Kennedy, of Justice Thurgood Marshall, of Mohandas K. Gandhi, of W.E.B. du Bois, of Harvey Milk and Jesse Jackson….of all the tireless crusaders who put their lives at risk and on the line, from the students in Tian an Men to Vaclav Havel speaking for the hearts and minds of Eastern Europe on the streets of Prague…
This one goes out to the visionaries, those who were of, and yet ahead of, their time….like George Orwell, like Simone de Beauvoir, like Walter Benjamin, like John Lennon and the generation of ’68…and those like John Muir, Frances Moore Lappe, Rachel Carson and E.F. Schumacher who dared to look ahead at where we are going…
It goes out to authors like Upton Sinclair, Toni Morrison and John Steinbeck….Willa Cather and August Wilson….to William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon…Zora Neal Hurston and Ralph Ellison…Tennessee Williams and James Agee…Audre Lorde and Raymond Carver…and journalists like Daniel Ellsberg, Jimmy Breslin, Studs Terkel, Bill Moyers, Teri Gross and Barbara Kopple…
this one goes out for you James Baldwin…
And this one is for those spokespeople who’ve been forgotten almost as soon as they were known…Wangari Maathai, Shirin Ebadi and Aung San Suu Kyi…this one goes out in memoriam to Dith Pran…
This one is for some of those others we have lost including….Ken Saro Wiwa, Oscar Romero, and Chico Mendes…and to some of those who remain…Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Bernadette Devlin, Gustavo Gutierrez and Elie Wiesel…
This one goes out to those who were apostates, who refused to be constrained by rules and forms…from Guillaume Apollinaire to Richard Pryor…from Tom Waits to Diane Arbus…from Jacques Derrida to Joe Strummer and John Zorn…to Pablo Neruda, Frida Kahlo and Muhammed Ali…and this one goes out to Susan Sontag and Edward Said…
And yes….to Abbie Hoffman, to Wavy Gravy, to Jimi and Janice and Eldridge and Jerry…and to all those who burned bright and wacky and let their freak flag fly in the 60’s and 70’s when America was still so uptight, so taut, so wrongly at war…and so unable to face its own true beauty….
This one goes out to Odetta, Woodie, Huddie and Peet….
This one goes out to the nameless contrarians, the street shouters, the performers, the folk singers, the dancers, the rabble rousers, the humorists….this one’s for you Lenny…those who can’t shut up…and those who make us want to sing along…like Martha Reeves and David Bowie….like Aretha, Joni and Coltrane…like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and the Boss….like Ani and Mary J. Blige…like Rasaahn Roland Kirk and Sun Ra….
This one goes out for you Patti Smith….
And it goes out to those like Whoopi and Anna and Tony K…it goes out to Larry and Betty and Gloria…it goes out to Tupac and Biggie and Chuck and Spike…and all those who tell the truth as they see it regardless of what others might think….it goes out to the countless rebels and resisters who stood up and spoke out in large and small ways…against injustice, against inequity…because it just wasn’t right…or because, like Eminem, they felt they had to fight…this one goes out to Michael Moore…
It goes out to all those who have seen the power of beauty, of truth, of that vision of America that Carl Sandberg spoke so well…that Maya Angelou would echo…and Allen Ginsburg would howl….
This one goes out to Walt Whitman…our brother, our father, our mother…a poet who worked as a nurse during the Civil War…because our soldiers should never be forgotten…
And today, this essay is for you, Casey Sheehan. Your mother is standing proud and strong in the Texas heat in your name. Her actions honor you today, and pay you respect more than our words ever could.
You stand for all those who’ve lost their lives in this war in Iraq: Americans, Allies, Iraqis.
Casey Sheehan, we remember you today, and seek justice and peace in your memory…and in memory of all those we’ve lost in this war in Iraq.
