Editor’s NOTE: A transcription never
captures the energy and excitement of a moment. To get you in the mood
for Paul Hawken’s PASA address, let me tell you about the moment.
There were 1400 farmers and activists on a cold and snowy February day
packed into a large institutional hall in Happy Valley, the home of Penn
State University. Listening to Paul speak to this crowd was like being
at a secular revival meeting. We were all swept up by the sweet sense
that our dreams and visions for ourselves and our world were shared by
tens of millions of people in hundreds of thousands of small groups all
over the world—what Paul called “civil society.” And
when Paul said “There are two super powers in the world …
and one of them is civil society,” I believe we all sighed “Yeah.
We’re not alone.” The woman working with AIDS victims in
Botswana is connected to me, working with farmers in PA. We share a common
vision; we work toward the same goals. And, collectively, we are strong
and growing stronger. Sometimes I still wake up in the morning with a
sweet lingering sense of the fundamental truth of that. What follows
is an abridged version of Hawken’s address at PASA. –Chris
Hill, Executive Editor.
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Thank you very much for welcoming me. I’m not wearing
a suit so you don’t mistake me for a businessman.
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t sleep well
last night. I thought a lot about what Percy [Schmeiser] said
last night, and I was thinking about my grandfather and what
he would have done if somebody walked onto his fields. It
was always locked and loaded. Just listening to Percy made
me angry … and it wasn’t even my farm.
As Percy did last night, I’d like to just give you
a little bit of my own background. I grew up mostly on but
sometimes off the farm. It was my grandfather’s, in
the San Joaquin Valley. He’d been a farmer since the
‘20s and through the depression. He always had two jobs,
one off the farm and one on. You probably know that story.
We were Scotch and German and Swedish and Cornish on that
side, and on my grandmother’s side we married into Portuguese
and my favorite uncle was Portuguese, Joe Kreitz. He grew
olives. I tell this story because it made a very big impression
on me. He was really happy one day when he got a big contract
to pack olives with Safeway. It seemed like, boy, the gravy
train had rolled right in. Every year Safeway bought a few
more olives, or quite a few more, and every year they just
negotiated that price down just a little bit less and pretty
soon it got to the point where they were most of his business
and he wasn’t making any money and they wanted a lower
price again.
I remember being a small child going to his place near Corning,
and there were trucks there and everyone was upset and, basically,
he had gone bankrupt with Safeway, and it left a very deep
impression on me about the relationship between farming and
corporations.
At the same time as I grew up, I was pretty sick. I had asthma
and that had a lot to do with the fact that I grew up in the
San Joaquin Valley which has, along with the Bronx, the highest
rate of asthma in the United States. One out of five children
carries an inhaler in the San Joaquin Valley. When I was twenty
years old I got tired of taking medicine and I thought, well,
there must be something I can do about it, so I started reading
books from Rodale and many others. And it basically said “Clean
up your act. It might have something to do with what you’re
eating.”
| " I got rid of the hamburgers,
the shakes, you know, the French fries, which I missed
dearly. And sure enough my symptoms went away. And then
I went back to eating the junk food and the coca cola
and, boom, it came right back. It went back and forth
until I was finally convinced that food made a big difference
in my life." |
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So, I started to eat pure foods, natural foods, which wasn’t
so difficult because it was the food that my grandmother canned
and froze and served and baked – so it wasn’t
a real stretch. I changed my diet very radically. I got rid
of the hamburgers, the shakes, you know, the French fries,
which I missed dearly. And sure enough my symptoms went away.
And then I went back to eating the junk food and the coca
cola and, boom, it came right back. It went back and forth
until I was finally convinced that food made a big difference
in my life.
I noticed in the process that it was difficult for me to
get food. I was living in the Bay area at the time, and had
to go to this Lebanese store, to this Chinese store, to the
Japanese store, to this place where they had wheat, etc. I
just thought that somebody ought to put it all together in
one location. That was how in 1966 I started what was one
of the first of what I call natural food stores, which is
basically a farm stand in the city—a store that did
not sell vitamins at all. We sold food.
I knew nothing about business. I was just stunningly naïve.
[This was in Boston, where Paul moved in the mid-60s. The
business? Erewhon.] I remember going to Harvard, sneaking
into classes, listening to time sequence matrices of progress
analyses, using the BCG model of cows and dogs, and I’d
be taking notes and go back to my warehouse and we’re
selling … wheat. I could never figure out how to apply
it.
I remember in a coffee shop there listening to two guys talking.
I was twenty, but I was thirteen when it came to business.
My only prior commercial experience had been a paper route.
These two guys were talking, Harry was talking to Manny and
Manny was saying to Harry, “Geez, I’m really sorry
about the fire at your warehouse last night,” and Harry
said, “Shhh, it’s tomorrow night.” It’s
a little different than the inventory control methods they
were teaching at Harvard.
But we grew and we grew. By the time I left seven years later
we had 50,000 acres of farmland under contract in the United
States that was all organically or biodynamically grown. And
remember this was the late Sixties. We had hard red winter
wheat from Montana, hard red spring wheat from Texas, we had
durham in soft white wheat from eastern Washington, we had
buckwheat from Pennsylvania, we had long grain rice from Louisiana,
medium grain rice from Arkansas, we had cocoa from California,
open pollinated sunflower seeds from North Dakota, and so
on and so on and so on. We had vegetables, fruits, beans,
and nuts.
What I decided to do was recreate a food supply. The reason
I did that was because when I first opened up and started
selling things, somebody came into the store and they held
up a bottle of Hain cold pressed oil and they said, “How
do you know it’s cold pressed?” I said, “Well,
it says so.” I defended it until they left, and then
I thought about it and I said to myself, “I don’t
know a darn thing about the food I’m selling.”
So I wrote a letter to Hain. It said, “Would you please
provide me a letter attesting that your oil is cold pressed.”
They came back to me and said, ‘Well, it’s not
really cold pressed. It’s cold processed, which means
that once it’s extracted,we freeze it and draw out the
stearates and ….” So I started writing to other
manufacturers and I found out that virtually everything I
was selling was a fraud. This was stuff in health food stores.
That’s why, in our stores, it was the name of the farmer, the
name of his farm or her farm, the name of the agricultural practices
used, the type of soil--it was completely transparent so that we didn’t
have to ask you to trust us. We started the first certification organization
in the United States, in California, as well. That’s my background
with farming.
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"When I first opened up and started
selling things, somebody came into the store and they
held up a bottle of Hain cold pressed oil and they said,
“How do you know it’s cold pressed?”
I said, “Well, it says so.” I defended it
until they left, and then I thought about it and I said
to myself, “I don’t know a darn thing about
the food I’m selling.”" |
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Since then, I have always worked in my life in this relationship
with business and the environment because, going back to my
Uncle Kreitz, you can see that business has the power to destroy
or it has the power to restore. It can be at service to farmers,
to the land, to consumers, or it can be something that takes
advantage of the land, of the environment, of consumers. Generally
speaking and almost universally, in my experience, the bigger
the company gets the less likely it is to serve humankind.
Now, it’s interesting to talk about sustainability.
Recently I was asked by a California group to talk about sustainability,
and one of the sponsors said she didn’t want me to speak
unless there was somebody there to present the other side.
At first I was upset, but then I got pretty excited about
it. I would love to hear the other side. I am dying to know
what the other side of sustainability is. Some even make the
business case for it as well. What is the business case for
being the last generation on earth? That’s interesting.
The business case for double-glazing the planet with the carboniferous
period? I’d like to see a Harvard case study on that.
And what’s the business case for an economic system
that tells us it’s cheaper to destroy the Earth than
to take care of it in real time? I want someone to explain
to me why we are given economic signals that are deeply, deeply
antithetical to our own deeply held values and common sense.
Why do these innate qualities of goodness, of inclusion, of
generosity get thwarted consistently by commerce and politics?
In short, why is it that we live in two worlds instead of
one? I want to know. And that person never showed up.
It’s often said that talk is cheap, that conversations
are not. This conversation you’ve been having [at PASA]
for the last thirteen years now? First of all, you know it’s
not cheap. The organizers know that. It takes a lot of money
and organization and sweat to do this. But these conversations
are occurring around the world. There are conversations about
ecology, about justice, about democracy. The concept of justice
is not just about rights and wrongs. At the heart of this
conversation about sustainability, it’s really about
the language of kinship. It’s a language of possibility.
It’s not the language of foreclosure or exclusion or
retrogression.
It’s the language of possibility, particularly for
those people who have been exploited or ignored. To have this
conversation it requires that we listen patiently and carefully
to each other, of course, but even to those whose views we
many not agree with. And all of us carry that responsibility--to
carry this conversation forward into the world about what
it means to be a human being at a time when every living system
on Earth is in decline and the rate of decline is accelerating.
In some ways that’s putting it just a bit too polite.
In fact, life is being annihilated on earth. There was on
March 7th, 2000, in Nature, an article about extinction,
recovery, and biodiversity. It said this: “It takes
the Earth ten million years to recover from a mass extinction
of species, far longer than previously thought. It takes the
environment just as long to recover from the extinction of
even just a few species--smaller events that nevertheless
rip holes in the biosphere that are impossible ever fully
to repair. When you lose a species it’s not ever coming
back. You can’t recreate an animal – extinction
is final.”
The article, by Kerchner at UC Berkeley, predicted that up
to half of all species would vanish over the next 50 to 100
years. “If we deplete the planet’s biodiversity,
we will not only leave a biologically impoverished planet,
not only for our children or our children’s children,
but for all of the children of our species that there will
ever be.” It may sound a little neat, a little pat,
but it cannot be embroidered. The fact is that the corporate
form of commerce that has been practiced on this planet is
destroying life on Earth.
And the marginalization of nature is always the marginalization
of human beings. Always. They do not occur separately. It
was Lewis who said that man’s power over nature turns
out to be the power exercised by some men over other men with
nature as its instrument. It is the power of corporations
over people and place. It is the power that was never granted
and must be taken away by those to whom this power rightly
rests.
Today, the fluency with which we describe our relationship
to life also has been debased. The environmental and social
justice movement is an attempt to, in a sense, enlarge its
vocabulary to create a vastly expanded sense of what is possible
for human kind. Fendera said that the struggle of man against
power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, but it’s
also the struggle of language itself against what has been
muted, of intelligence and insight against the confinement
of the tellers and sound byte, of human decency against the
convoluted lies of corporate communications offices.
| " I want someone to explain to
me why we are given economic signals that are deeply,
deeply antithetical to our own deeply held values and
common sense. Why do these innate qualities of goodness,
of inclusion, of generosity get thwarted consistently
by commerce and politics? In short, why is it that we
live in two worlds instead of one? I want to know. And
that person never showed up." |
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Our grief over the loss of lives in 9/11 was manipulated
to justify war. Our love of nature is being manipulated by
corporations to continue their predation of the environment
and our people. The media is so concentrated in this country
that we are simply breathing our own exhaust fumes. At some
point, in the face of remote tyranny, as is in the face of
corporate hegemony, you have to do something. As the poet
Rumi wrote, just don’t stand there and pray –
do something. Each generation carries with it a story, you
know, and then it passes on to the next generation. The present
story is the endless extension of industrialism, of toxicity,
of combustion, of exploitation. Industrialism and industrial
farming took a complex living system and transformed it into
a low life high way system. And we are told that this system,
which describes people as easily as it describes ecological
integrity, is the cheapest, and that social justice, living
wages, local democratic rule, green buildings, global food
security, renewable energy and biologically based agriculture
are just too darn expensive. At our best we are asked to entrust
these goals to transnational corporations and free markets.
We are literally told that it is cheaper to destroy the Earth
in real time rather than to conserve and honor and maintain
the dignity of humanity and this miracle that we call life.
So, at the heart of our current system is the belief that
life is expensive. This is of course bizarre, it’s upside
down and backwards, but it goes back to language and perception.
In my work I get the opportunity to stand here and look at
people like you many, many times--maybe 600 times now, I’ve
given a keynote speech in this country and countries around
the world. And what I have come fiercely to believe is that
this world lies in the hands of ordinary people … and
thank God. Here’s what I mean by that: It is just simply
not realistic to expect or look for courageous and inspiring
leadership from any large institution, whether it be scientific,
academic, business, or government. I do not mean that institutions
are unnecessary but the scope and breadth of the world’s
problems now lie far beyond the reach and the ethos of these
monolithic organizations that have basically trailed us into
the 21st century.
The real questions are these: Do people have the right to
determine their own biological destiny? Do they have the right
to live in their homes secure from corporate and government
oppression? Yeah. We fought the British to overthrow the yoke
of external domination; we certainly do. So it’s a completely
rhetorical question. We have an enshrined right to live without
the threat of remote tyranny and we have the right to resist
it. It is the backbone of this country. It was the right of
the First People who proceeded us (to be trampled on), but
it is definitely still our right as well.
Thus, the answer to agribusiness cannot come from Washington
D.C., it cannot come from Philadelphia. It must come from
bioregions. Life is regional. It’s not national, you
know. If we had a real government in Washington D.C., I would
still maintain this position. Given that we only have a simulacrum
of a government, it becomes imperative to seek local control.
Not only is all politics local but, really, so is all sustainability.
Now, we hear around the world this cry against globalization.
And I would like to, in a sense, offer you the idea that this
cry against globalization is the same concern as you have,
and it’s a protest against corporatization of the commons.
It is so insidious because the corporations that are issuing
social responsibility reports are busy closing and dominating
the world’s commons. These “commons” include
our stories, which are our culture. They include our music,
our right to determine our own destiny, democracy itself.
They include the ability of people to decide what is and what
isn’t acceptable in a locale, a region or place. All
these areas in our life are being corrupted by corporations
and as Wendell Berry would tell you, all publicly held corporations
live a lie. They believe that we reside in a world where capital
has the right to grow, and that that right is higher than
the rights of people, of culture, of place, of those qualities
that have historically been our commons.
There’s something colossally wrong with this view.
You can’t get to sustainability from an economic model
that strives to increase the amount of money large corporations
have. You can’t get there if you’re destroying
small local economies. You can’t get there if you’re
McDonald’s and you’re spending two billion dollars
a year to get our children to eat junk food. We cannot correct
environmental problems if we don’t correct the assumptions
that cause them. Most of the world’s government and
economy are under the control of corporations, and corporations
are striving to increase this control. Yet the world is increasingly
out of control. There is a direct connection between these
two phenomena.
A highly placed government official from the Clinton administration
met with his counterpart in the Bush administration. His conclusion?
“They are not governing. They are preventing governance
in order to serve their masters’ corporations.”
Even if a large corporation does not engage in that activity,
why are they mute in the face of this liquidation sale of
our commons to private interests? This weight of corporate
colonization is having disastrous results in San Francisco,
Suez, Lanais, in France. Novartis, Dupont, Monsanto want to
take control of—and this is a direct quote in a private
meeting—“ninety percent of the germ plasm of ninety
percent of the caloric intake of the world.” That’s
their corporate strategic goal. Now, these are companies who
made their money making toxic aniline dyes, animal hormones,
artificial sweeteners, explosives, and pesticides.
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"They can get out of our schools,
they can get out of our stomachs, they can get out of
our government, they can get out of our rivers, our oceans
and our forests, they can get out of our skies and our
soils and get out of our farms, they can get out of our
seeds and human genome and they can stop molesting our
children. That’s something corporations can do positively.
" |
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Ted Turner said there will be two media companies in the world.
He wants to have a stake in one of them, AOL/Time Warner. Rupert
Murdock agrees and wants to be the other. McDonald’s opens
up 2,800 restaurants a year and even the U.S. government has
said that the doubling of childhood obesity and diabetes in
the past ten years in due to fast food. Right now one out of
every five meals in the U.S. is fast food. McDonald’s
wants that to be true everywhere. Coke has now achieved 10%
of the world’s TLI (Total Liquid Intake). Ten percent
of anything you drink in the world is sold to you by Coca Cola.
Their goal is to go to 20%. What do you think their goal will
be at 20%? These are absurd and devastating goals for corporations.
Somebody asked me once, “Well, can’t you say
something positive?” So I will. There are some positive
things that corporations can do. Let me list them to you:
They can get out of our schools, they can get out of our
stomachs, they can get out of our government, they can get
out of our rivers, our oceans and our forests, they can get
out of our skies and our soils and get out of our farms, they
can get out of our seeds and human genome and they can stop
molesting our children. That’s something corporations
can do positively.
Here’s another Wendell Berry quote: “A corporation
does not age. It does not arrive as most persons do in realization
of the shortness and smallness of human life. It does not
come to see the future as a lifetime of the children and the
grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience
no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot
humble itself. It goes about it’s business as if it
were immortal with the single purpose of becoming a bigger
pile of money.” And I believe that until corporations
understand that they are spearheading a kind of commercial
fascism, they’re going to find that our resistance will
continue to grow and grow.
I say fascist because it’s fascist when there’s
an assumption that a small group of people know better than
the larger group. That is called fascism. It doesn’t
matter that it’s hard for us to use that word in our
culture because we think we’re a democracy. In The
Latches in the Olive Tree, Tom Freedman wrote, ‘The
hidden hand in the market will never work without a hidden
fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonald Douglass.
It is the hidden fist that keeps the world safe in the Silicon
Valley.” This is so bizarre that it is accepted as foreign
policy.
The question to be grappled with by all of us is the shape
of relationships. This is what this conversation of sustainability
is about. What is going to be the relationship between a region
and its people? Between companies, markets, and the commons
which support all life. And we’ll have to come down
in the end to some very simple questions. Do we want democracy
and self-determination? Or, do we want oligarchic institutions?
Do we want a world of uniformity where the road from every
airport to every city center looks like every other strip
mall and every other part of the world? Do we want the world
envisioned by Monsanto and Walmart and Disney? Do we want
our nine-year-old girls being lured to McDonald’s with
Happy Meals and dolls? Or, do we want strong regional cultures
proud of their heritage devoted to the land, committed to
real development and the future of their children?
In short, do we want a world structured by mostly rich men
or a world which is an expression of the fabulous qualities
of human beings. That is what we’re faced with.
We know that the way to create healthy, vibrant economies
and societies is through diversity. There’s no question
about that. We know that scientifically. Any system that loses
its diversity loses its resiliency and is more subject to
sudden shocks and changes from which it cannot recover. This
corporatization of the commons is the abject loss of diversity.
It forces uniformity upon people, upon place. Historian Arnold
Toynby said that the sign of a civilization in decay is the
institution of uniformity and the lack of diversity.
So we can judge our companies now not necessarily by whether
they’re large or small, but by this criteria: the degree
to which a company honors and allows diversity to emerge from
a place, a country, a locale is a good thing; the degree to
which it tries to enforce a one size fits all formulate solution
to diet or media or agriculture I, in my opinion, going to
be seen in hind sight as just as much of a criminal act as
the deracination and the slaughter of indigenous people by
the Spaniards, and later by us. We will look back at what
we’re doing now and see it as a violation of humanity.
I believe that in our lifetime we will convict corporations
of crimes against humanity.
We know—you know in this room—how to transform
this world. We know what to do. We know how to provide meaningful,
dignified living wage jobs for all who seek them, how to feed,
clothe, and house every person on Earth. What we don’t
know, admittedly, is how to remove those in power whose ignorance
of biology is matched only by their indifference.
This is a political issue. It is not an ecological problem.
But the way to save the Earth is to focus on its people and
in particular those people who have paid and continue to pay
the highest price under its current system. They are women,
they are children, they are communities of color, and they
are the localized poor. This sustainability movement--without
forsaking its understanding of living systems, of resource
flow, of conservation biology--must move from a resource flow
model of saving the Earth to a model based on human rights,
the rights to food, the rights to livelihood, the rights to
culture, the rights to community, and the rights to self-sufficiency.
Essentially, the sustainability movement must become a civil
rights and human rights movement. Sustainability for me represents
and stands for improving the quality of life for all people
on Earth. Diversity means possibilities and choice, and the
only kind of sustainable development that makes sense is about
alleviating the suffering and honoring all forms of life.
The world is waiting for answers, and right now the main providers
seem to be fundamentalists--whether they be political or religious
or economic. It was David Bower who said that environmentalists
make terrible neighbors but great ancestors. There are two
voices on the world stage and one is the voice of the wealthy
and the other voice is the rest of us. One is a minority and
one is the majority.
André Gide said once that one does not discover new
lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a
very long time. We are in deed in a very long period of this
continuity from one system to the next. We do not know what
it will be called. We do not know what it will be named, but
we know collectively that we are moving towards it. We live
in an extraordinary time, the most corrupt period since reconstruction.
| "This shared understanding is
arising spontaneously from different economic sectors,
from every country in the world, from different regions
and cohorts. It is spreading and growing worldwide. No
one started this world view. No one is in charge of it
and there is no orthodoxy. This is the sustainability
movement. This is what you are creating. It is the fastest
growing movement in the world and it will prevail, not
as an ideology but as a standard set by humanity for itself." |
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Nobody really talks about it, keep in mind. This is the president,
the person you are sending into office with a criminal record.
We can forgive that. But he appointed more convicted criminals
than anybody in U.S. history and that should raise some eyebrows.
He presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history,
and refused to intervene when the corruption was revealed.
He appointed the richest cabinet in history of any U.S. administration.
The poorest multimillionaire, Liza Rice, has a Chevron oil
tanker named after her. He presided over the biggest stock
market fraud in any market in any country in the history of
the world. He created the largest government department bureaucracy
in the history of the United States. I could go on and on.
The thing is, we live in very disturbing times. Mark Twain
said that you can’t see if your imagination is out of
focus--and it’s very hard to focus our imagination when
what we see is a kind of shortsightedness and venality all
around us. It has poisoned us, but we don’t want to
find ourselves at the end or our life wondering if we had
made or done something particular or real, or in fact were
simply merely visitors to the planet. There’s this great
quote. See if you can guess who said it: “This is not
a time of gentleness, of tinted beginnings that’s stealing
to life with soft apologies. This is a time for a loud voice,
open speech, fearless thinking, a time for all that is robust,
vehement and bold, a time radiant with new ideals, new hopes
of true democracy. I am a child of my generation. I rejoice
that I live in such splendidly disturbing times.” That’s
Helen Keller. Isn’t it wonderful?
Remember. I said there were two worlds and two voices. In
February, the New York Times said that there are two superpowers
in the world, and one of course is the U.S. The other superpower
is civil society. You are civil society. There are in the
world today over one hundred thousand non-governmental organizations,
foundations, citizen-based organizations, that are addressing
these issues of social and ecological sustainability. They
address such a broad range of issues: environmental justice,
ecological design, affordable housing, conservation, women’s
rights and health, population, renewable energy, corporate
reform labor rights, climate change, trade rules, sustainable
cities, water, and more. Some groups conform, resist; others
create new structures, patterns, and means; some do both.
What is so extraordinary about the time you live in is if
you ask each of these groups, if you ask PASA, all of you
collectively, the board, staff, and you ask these groups for
their principles, their frameworks, their conventions, their
mental models, their declarations, what is it that informs
you? What is your mission? And we’ll find that none
of these conflict, amongst these 100,000 groups in the world.
They don’t conflict, but they are not the same. This
is real human evolution. Such an upwelling of shared wisdom
and understanding has never before happened in history, never.
In the past, movements have always started with the very
centralized set of ideas and then dispersed outward from that
– Christianity, Marxism, Freud, you name it--and generally
became divisive over time. The sustainability movement does
not agree on everything, nor should it ever, but it shares
a basic set of fundamental understandings about the Earth,
how it functions, the necessary of fairness and equity for
all people in partaking of the Earth’s life giving systems.
All believe that their right to self-sufficiency is a basic
human right. They believe that water, air, and oceans and
land are sacred. That’s God’s business, not ours.
But they do belong to us all in a sense that we are stewards
of them. They do believe that seeds cannot be patented or
owned nor can any other life forms by corporations. And they
believe that nature is the basis of true prosperity and must
be honored. That must we fight poverty, and not the poor.
This shared understanding is arising spontaneously from different
economic sectors, from every country in the world, from different
regions and cohorts. It is spreading and growing worldwide.
No one started this world view. No one is in charge of it
and there is no orthodoxy. This is the sustainability movement.
This is what you are creating. It is the fastest growing movement
in the world and it will prevail, not as an ideology but as
a standard set by humanity for itself.
Now, it is said that society honors living conformists and
dead troublemakers. So let’s cast our lot with those
who age after age with no extraordinary power choose to reconstitute
the world, in Adrianne Rich’s words. Some of you, I
think--perhaps all of you--know Terri ‘Tempest’
Williams, the author of Refuge. Extraordinary woman.
I was emailing her the other day actually about PASA, about
this conference, about speaking, what it means to leave your
home far away and go speak to people you don’t know
and go back home. We were just trading notes and I would like
to close and read you what she wrote, because it’s to
you.
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She said, ‘I have been reading Emerson’s speeches. They are revelatory.
Ten thousand people would come to hear him speak. This is
part of the American tradition. We pay a price, all of us,
and each takes their turn. To PASA: Please don’t lose
heart. You each and all are courageous and revolutionary.
We must support and build each other up. A crisis of confidence
each of us faces in our darkest hours is only what the opposition
wants. I have been reading Walt Whitman. We need his reminders,
conscience, moral judgments, and justice. If something happens
that we can no longer hear our voice, believe me: Your voice
is loud, it is clear, it is resonant.’
PASA, thank you very much for inviting me and allowing me
to address you, but mostly thank you very, very much for your
work. It does not go unnoticed in the rest of the world.
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