a few words from harry belafonte
you can read a lot more words, i picked a few.
What’s wrong with criticism? What’s wrong with the voice of dissent? What’s wrong with another point of view? That’s what America is built on. And I want to tell you something — the minute we lose that right and that capacity to do that, we’ve lost our soul as a nation.
So now that so much exists that has filled this world with such villainy and such frustration, and in so many places, such hopelessness, people look to the place that articulates, at least out of its tradition, America articulated the hope that the future could be about.
So when George Bush gets on television yet again– with so much frequency, incidentally– and he speaks about this nation rallying to saving itself from the jaws of this fearful force that’s out there that have us caught up in this great war, people around the world don’t know quite what we’re talking about.
And I think America has to wake up to the fact that we’re sitting in a period when if we are prepared to let our rights be co-opted, as Ashcroft and others are constantly putting on the table, when you look at whom they’re putting up for selection in the courts of America, and what they’re saying would be the people who mete out the justice to our citizens, you will understand the extent to which we are in trouble and how much like the ’50’s this is.
This century, we simply don’t have room for war. And there are always alternatives. Even the Soviet Union and the South African apartheid regime were overthrown without shots being fired.
day-o!