facing the inauguration

Doris "Granny D" Haddock speaking in Washington DC on Thursday, Jan. 20, 2005


Thank you all.

We have honored Dr. King this week. When we honor him we honor many others, all the way back in time to the Sermon on the Mount and beyond, who have given us, if we will but use them, the political tools of love and their great power over all other human forces.

Gandhi taught us that, when used right, non-violent non-cooperation always wins. He gave us five principles to remember in its use: First, know that you are dealing with the truth. Do your research. Bring in the experts. Know the truth before you dare speak for it.

Second, ask those in authority to remedy the problem at hand, and give them a reasonable time to act. Don't ask them to do more than they can.

Third, involve the wider community's conscience in the problem. Share the problem widely.

Fourth, if those in power will not remedy the problem, show the extent of your moral concern through your personal sacrifice. Stand in the way of the injustice with your own body, doing no harm to others, for it is your moral courage that will move the conscience of society toward awareness and action. If you have not won yet, your sacrifice has been insufficient. The fifth principle, because the previous four will give you control of the issue, is to graciously allow the opposing side to save face in the final settlement, as you must love them, too, and will meet them again.

We have the power to win, to serve justice, to protect our neighbors and our planet, but victory comes at the price of our courage and our pain.

So we have our issues. A warming planet, an unjust war, a long list of policies that do great harm to the people and places of the world. We have done our homework and know the truth. We have petitioned for the redress of our grievances and we have waited. We have informed the world so that many are involved. We know what is next for us and it is the fourth principle: our sacrifice.

So that our great grandchildren will look back and say of us, yes, in the first years of the 21st Century, they faced the most difficult of times with extraordinary courage. They knew they would not live forever and they cared that their lives and deaths should mean something. They saved American democracy and the life of the planet with their creative resistance and their courage. While others around them slept through grey lives, they were awake, they saw, they acted, they overcame all the great forces against them. They saved the forests and mountains, the oceans, streams, the air, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, they saved our ancient hope for a just world, for a peaceful world, where the highest potential of every human might be understood as the greatest resource of every society and nation.

Well, we know where we are and who we struggle against. I have been in their jails and it's not so bad. I know many of you have been in their prisons and felt the sting of their batons and bullets and gasses, and it is not so bad, compared to losing our freedom or the life of our planet.

The limousines of monstrous presumption whisk by us today, but we need not feel powerless, for the real power of history is always in the people's hearts and hands. All the power of change is given by fate and history to the courageous, who fear the loss of liberty and justice more than that brief glimmer of life that sparkles through the eternity of who we are. And so we take our parts in the great struggle between dark and light, fear and love, between the withering decomposition of separation, and the living joy of combination, cooperation and growth.

Let our neighbors, who have voted another way or not at all, see what we are made of and what we are willing to do for love, for life, for justice. Only a few more of them need step forward to our side for love and life and justice to win. They will not step forward if we are not full of courage and grace and beauty and most of all love. We will inspire them with awe. For, from this time forward, our courage must rise to end the war and the coming wars, to end the destruction of our land and its people, and of our planet and its life. With love in our hearts, with a vision before us of a better America made visible in our own lives, we will do what history demands of us now.

And so say us all.

ny times editorial worth sharing

When Winter Comes

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: December 17, 2004

ARTICLE TOOLS E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Format Most E-Mailed Articles READERS' OPINIONS Forum: Join a Discussion on Today's Editorials TIMES NEWS TRACKER Topics Alerts Weather Klinkenborg, Verlyn Hudson Valley (NY) Track news that interests you.

or as long as I've lived in the country, I've tried to figure out what it means to be ready for winter. Every winter brings a different answer. One year the chimney gets cleaned; one year the rain gutters. One year I stack enough wood to heat us through May, and one year the garden gets put to bed properly. But I've never managed to make all these things happen in the same year. The only constant, year to year, is hay. There's always enough of it, stacked well before the leaves have finished falling. The horses insist.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm always preparing for a different winter than the one that comes. When we first bought this small farm, I discovered that you can muddle through even a hard winter. The power mostly stays on. The oil man comes on a regular schedule. The phone never goes out.

Sometimes, well below zero, the yard hydrants freeze up, but with a little heat tape, they thaw again. Even in the dead of winter, the wood man will make a delivery, though calling him feels like a sober confession of failure.

The last two winters in the Hudson Valley were brutal. Yet they weren't as long or as hard or as dark as I expected them to be. The winter solstice comes and goes before the real cold begins, so I always feel that at least we have that out of the way. No matter how bitter it gets in late January, it won't be getting any darker. The season is always more transitional than it seems, as fleeting as summer. Every day is headway toward spring.

No matter how unprepared I am, I always imagine preparing for a winter you can't muddle through. It's a deep, wooded season. Time pauses and then pauses again. The sun winks over the horizon, glinting on a snow-swept lake - just enough light to wake the chickadees.

The eaves are low all around the house that this winter comes to, and I've surrounded the entire house with cordwood, leaving gaps for the windows and doors. Winter will go nowhere until I've burned through it all.

I have no plans except to rake the snow off the roof after the next big blizzard, and carry out the ashes from the woodstove, and read everything I've ever meant to read.

Of course, a daydream like this isn't really about winter or snow or firewood or even the feeling of having prepared every last thing that needs preparing. It's about something far more elemental, the time that moves through us day by day. It's an old human hope - to have a consciousness separate from the consciousness of time. But it's always a vain hope.

I'll never get that much cordwood stacked, and never need to. Winter comes and goes in the same breath, condensing right before your face on a day when the temperature never gets up to 20 degrees.

VERLYN KLINKENBORG