want America to
really be for everybody
let us make it so

Can we not put our heads together and think and plan — not merely dream — the future America?

We do not want any secondary Americans.

We do not want a weak and imperfect democracy.

We do not want poverty and hunger and prejudice and fear on the part of any portion of our population.

We want America to really be America for everybody.

Let us make it so!

Langston Hughes, Speech at the Public Session of the Third American Writers’ Congress, Carnegie Hall, New York City, June 2, 1939. (Langston Hughes Papers. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.)

Something about Mr. Hughes’ words remind of the words used in what some call The Birth Cerificate of the United States of America, otherwise known as the Declaration of Indepedence.

The words where Mr. Jefferson, with contributions from the rest of the Continental Congress, wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

They were saying …

We do not want any secondary Americans.

We do not want a weak and imperfect democracy.

We do not want poverty and hunger and prejudice and fear on the part of any portion of our population.

We want America to really be America for everybody.

Let us make it so!

And they put their heads together to think and to plan to make it more than a dream.

The future they saw would require … That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

… Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

… deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

… from the consent of the governed.

It is time for us, the governed, to show up and spell out what we consent to.

For myself:

I do not want any secondary Americans.

I do not want a weak and imperfect democracy.

I do not want poverty and hunger and prejudice and fear on the part of any portion of our population.

I want America to really be America for everybody.

Let us make it so!

See you on November 3rd.

your generation’s
present is now another
generation’s past

Adapted from the passage in Baseball in ’41 by Robert W. Creamer (New York: Viking, 1991) where Mr. Creamer writes:

Middle age begins, I think, when you first recognize that events in your generation’s present are now in another generation’s past.

I became aware that I was edging into middle age when I was thirty-two, in 1954, the year I began working for Sports Illustrated.

I had seen my first major league game in 1931, and the baseball of the thirties and forties had always been part of my present.

But in 1954 the thirties were suddenly a long time ago.

I met people on the staff — my contemporaries, I considered them, although they were ten years younger than I — who had few, if any, memories of the years before World War II.

I had become part of an older generation, unable to share personal memories of twenty years before.

Now I am pushing seventy, and the 1954 contemporaries are pushing sixty, and I still can’t share my prewar memories with them.

What did a kid of eight know about the world an eighteen year-old lived in during 1941?

There are relatively few people out there with whom I can share memories of that vivid year.

What gets under my skin right now is the thought that trying to explain to anyone pretty born this century is that … it didn’t use to be this way.

There were rules to how the Government worked.

Yes there were times when folks played fast and lose with those BUT for the most part, both sides played by the rules.

The rule book was laid out in the Constituion and both sides had a level of respect for the playing by the rules.

Along came this feller who depised rules.

Who broke the rules.

Who spit on the rules.

Who spit on those who expected others to play by the rules.

It didn’t use to be like this.

I have become part of an older generation, unable to share personal memories of twenty years before.

There are relatively few people out there with whom I can share memories of the way it used to be.

That may be the biggest tragedy of all.