Signs of Hope

President Obama’s eulogy to the Tucson shootings victims (below and at right) was eloquent and appealed to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
Obama's speech is one of the greatest eulogies since Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Pericles' funeral oration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pericles%27_Funeral_Oration
And just when it appeared that stripminers would be able to destroy more miles of Appalachian streams with mountaintop removal mining, the EPA has revoked and rejected Arch Minerals’ permits. See below.
I was in the U.S. Senate staff gallery when the stripmining law was passed in 1977 – a big improvement, but which left lacunae, including the failure to control mountaintop removal mining.
Yesterday’s EPA action under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act is a victory for the land and the people of Appalachia, whom I got to know well as Editor of the Appalachian Observer newspaper in Clinton, Tennessee.
So is the prosecution of hate crimes, which continue to flourish, spurred by the sere remnants of the Ku Klux Klan and other domestic terrorist groups.
I still believe in a place called Hope.
As Langston Hughes said, we shall “let America be America again.”



Senator Robert F. Kennedy said in South Africa June 6, 1966, in the face of the racist Apartheid government there: “"Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation ... It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

Real Americans agree with the late Senator Robert Kennedy, who said in the Indianapolis ghetto 43 years ago this April 4th (the night Dr. King was murdered in Memphis): “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”