Tammy Baldwin addresses Millenium march on Washington DC

NEVER DOUBT

If I close my eyes, I can remember being here in 1987. I came to this city, this historic place, these steps. Why did I march? I was twenty-five years old and just one year into my first term in elective office in. I was OUT. I was at the point in my life where I had just realized that I did not have to choose between being honest about who I am and pursuing the career of my dreams. I could do both. And that moment of decision was, at once, one of the most terrifying and one of the most freeing of my life. So I marched...to replace my fear with courage, my isolation with belonging, my anger with hope.

If I close my eyes, I can remember being here in 1993. I came to this city, this historic place, these steps. Why did I march? I was thirty-one years old and had just been elected to the Wisconsin State Legislature. I had just gotten a touching glimpse of the power of our visibility. After a statewide news story announced that I was the first openly gay or lesbian person to be elected to state-level office in Wisconsin, I received a telephone call from a young man. His voice was wavering. He was from Northern Wisconsin and he said, "I read the story and I feel differently about myself today." So I marched...so that he and others might be able to replace fear with courage, isolation with belonging, anger with hope.

If I close my eyes again, I can remember coming to this city, this historic place, these steps in January, 1999. Only this time, I climbed these steps to take the oath of office. And as I climbed those steps, I remembered all those who had marched and mobilized -- those who helped pave the way for my election and the election of those who will come after me. You are with me every time I pass through those doors. And the lessons learned from you, from my participation in this civil rights movement, and from organizing against AIDS are now being applied, empowering me as I fight everyday the battle for health care for all, increasing educational opportunities, and fighting for many others who lack a voice in our democracy.

Now, with open eyes, I am experiencing this march. I come to this city, this historic place, these steps. I'm 38 years old and I'm a Member of Congress. Why do I march? I march to challenge the naysayers, the cynics, and the keepers of the status quo. And I march for a promising, inspiring, and incredible new generation...so they might replace their fear with courage, their isolation with belonging, their anger with hope. And I can say with conviction: Never doubt that there is reason to be hopeful.

NEVER DOUBT that Congress will pass legislation that expands the definition of hate crimes.

NEVER DOUBT that the states will grant us equal rights, including all the rights afforded couples through marriage.

NEVER DOUBT that we will enact legislation ensuring non-discrimination in the workplace.

NEVER DOUBT that America will one day realize that her gay, bisexual, and transgendered sons and daughters want nothing more -- and nothing less -- than the rights accorded every other citizen.

BUT WE MUST MAKE IT SO - by daring to dream of a world in which we are free. So, if you dream of a world in which you can put your partner's picture on your desk, then put his picture on your desk...and you will live in such a world.

And if you dream of a world in which you can walk down the street holding your partner's hand, then hold her hand...and you will live in such a world.

If you dream of a world in which there are more openly gay elected officials, then run for office...and you will live in such a world.

And if you dream of a world in which you can take your partner to the office party, even if your office is the U.S. House of Representatives, then take her to the party. I do, and now I live in such a world.

Remember, there are two things that keep us oppressed...them and us. We are half of the equation. There will not be a magic day when we wake up and it's now OK to express ourselves publicly. We make that day by doing things publicly...first in small numbers, then in greater numbers, until it's simply the way things are and no one thinks twice.

NEVER DOUBT that we will create this world, because, my friends, we are fortunate to live in a democracy; and in a democracy, WE decide what's possible!

The mindless menace of violence

By Robert F. Kennedy. City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio April 5, 1968.

Mr Chairmen, Ladies And Gentlemen

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lost their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

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 the 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.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force.

For all this, there are no final answers. Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

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 others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution. But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

[Speech given by RFK the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. died... excerpts reprinted in “Make Gentle the Life of this World” edited by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy - Robert Kennedy's son]

Have you seen the bright lily grow

by Benjamin Jonson

Have you seen but a bright lily grow
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of snow
Before the soil hath smutched it?
Have you felt the wool of beaver,
Or swan's down ever?
Or have smelt o' the bud o' the brier,
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she!