America, lest you forget: You are not North Korea. You are not Russia.
You are not China, or Cambodia, or Syria, or Eritrea, or Somalia. America, you are not Myanmar.
America, you do not build walls, you open doors. You do not restrict speech, you encourage expression. You do not deny truth, you pursue it, and fight to the death to protect it.
We must not allow any administration to alter the principles of this nation: We are America.
“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us." ― William O. Douglas
We must resist the present, repressive regime: Oppression must never become normalized.
“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things.” ― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
We must forever be revolutionaries: Our children and theirs deserve to live freely.
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Former U.S. President, Barack H. Obama
We must preserve our rights: Too many have died to safeguard them.
“Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away.” ― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
We must not yield to fear: The persistent resistance against tyranny and evil is our legacy.
“Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure ... Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.” ― Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear
We must unite with moral courage: Succumbing to deceit, propaganda and buffoonery will render us an eternally lost and corrupt nation.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
We must never support dictatorships: Living as puppets of the charlatan is equivalent to death.
The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission. – former U.S. President, John F. Kennedy
We must unite as a collective against autocratic threats: There is no time to entertain arbitrary and false divisions.
“I believe that there will be ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin...” ― Malcolm X
We must demand and stand for truth: There is no virtue in deceit, nor in willful ignorance.
“The very concept of freedom finds its roots in the Bible in one of the most famous quotes of Jesus” – Betty Miller “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).
“More than 1.6 billion people—23 percent of the world’s population—have no say in how they are governed and face severe consequences if they try to exercise their most basic rights, such as expressing their views, assembling peacefully, and organizing independently of the state.” – FreedomHouse.org. We cannot allow this to become the state-of-affairs in the United States of America.
#Resist
#Speakthe7words