And On This Day, The Edmund G. Pettus Bridge In Selma, Was Crossed -- 53 Years Ago...

Dr. King, Coretta Scott King and about 25,000 others finally crossed into Selma on this their third try, March 25, 1965.

. . .At times history and fate meet at a single time -- in a single place -- to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox.

So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem. Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult.

But about this there can and should be no argument: Every American citizen must have the right to vote. . . Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes. . . No law that we now have on the books. . . can insure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it. . . There is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong -- deadly wrong -- to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. . . .

-- President Lyndon B. Johnson
Introducing the Voting Rights Act to Congress

I congratulate and support the young people who have taken on America's tolerance of gun violence -- as the issue of their times. These are this generation's Bloody Sunday marchers (in many, many non-trivial ways).

Let us help them find clear voices -- for a human right to be free of automatic weapon induced killing sprees, in and around their schools (despite the text of the Second Amendment -- in a reading that is. . . tolerant, that the founders could have had no idea such exquisitely efficient human-killing machines would ever be in the hands of often deranged private citizens).

Now you know -- and now, go be the fire that "sets the world ablaze" -- for betterment: locally, nationally and globally -- thank you, Naomi Wadler. I could scarcely breathe -- as tears rolled down my cheeks -- listening to you:





नमस्ते