*Rejoice -- Alleluia*

Acts 2:24-28
But God raised him from the dead,
freeing him from the agony of death,
because it was impossible for death
to keep its hold on him...

David said about him:
‘I saw the Lord always before me.
Because he is at my right hand,
I will not be shaken.
Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest in hope,
because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
you will not let your holy one see decay.
You have made known to me the paths of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence.’
--------------------

Imagine Mary on that early Easter morning, her feet damp with the dew, the first to trod the path to the tomb's entrance that day.  Lo and behold: the boulder is rolled aside, the body gone missing...

She rushes away to gather friends, who return with her this time, to see what she has seen.  But then again they leave the scene; what a frightening few days for them it must have been ...

----------------------------------
Then the disciples went back to their homes, but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?"
 
"They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him."At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

"Woman," he said, "why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?" Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."

Jesus said to her, "Mary."
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" (which means Teacher).
 Jesus said, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, 'I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' "

Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: "I have seen the Lord!" And she told them that he had said these things to her.

----------------------------------

Rob Bell, the founding pastor and preacher at Mars Hill Church in Grandville, MI brings this marvelous thought to this story for this morning.  ...
Here is Rob Bell’s important observation. "It must be such a letdown to rise from the dead and not have your friends recognize you."

And Jesus, whom she thinks is the gardener, said to her, "Mary."

And she replies, "Rabbouni."

Pythagoras said, in 500 BC, "The beauty of music isn't created by the notes, but in the spaces between the notes." That is also the real secret of Jazz. It is also the painful reality of singing in a choir. Paying attention to the rests in a sheet of music can be maddening. But the genius of music is just there in the pauses. At least that’s what members of our Band of Praise tell me. I’m always ignoring the rests. I always come in too early or too late.

So it is that the genius of comedy exists in a sense of timing–a dramatic pause between words at the end of a joke. So is the genius of story-telling.

And now to the point: there must have been an extraordinary pause between the two words, "Mary" and "Rabbouni."

It just couldn’t have been as quick as the text seems to make it sound. "Mary/Rabbouni."

Like two businessmen had met in the hallway. "John!" "Bill! How are things? The kids? The wife?"

There are no stage directions in the Gospel text. There had to have been a pause there, and into that pause we could fit an entire universe of meaning and hope.
"Mary"

A long moment of distant recognition. Mary is not looking at the Gardener, I think. Her eyes are filled again with tears. She’s looking at the grass under her feet. She hears this voice uttering her name. "Mary."

She looks up at a point between the grass and the face of the gardener. Pauses there to consider the uttering of her name.

Confused at first.

Disoriented. The recognition has to take some time.  
In that moment, she has to reconsider her theory that the body has been stolen as she stares at that middle space between the grass at her feet and the face of the Gardener. She has to rethink all the next steps she needs to take in order to give her friend Jesus an honorable resting place. Can you grasp for a moment all the "stuff" that had to have gone into that instant between those two words, "Mary" and "Rabbouni"?

She looks at the gardener, stares deeply into those eyes; lets her own eyes clear and then says perhaps more as a question than a statement, "Rabbouni?"

I just think that this is one of the great moments in Gospel history. [ed.: emphasis mine.]

The space between the words "Mary" and "Rabbouni" could account for

every heartbreak,

every disappointment,

every terror of the human heart resolved in the uttering of a name.

In that space between Mary and Rabbouni is everything we believe.

In that space between Mary and Rabbouni is this extraordinary claim of the Christian faith.

That all that we thought of as the way things are have been undone. The old order of things has been broken. Our cynicism about life is dramatically reassessed. Things don’t have to be this way. Empty tombs don’t have to be explained by stolen bodies.

Maybe God is somehow at work to make all things new!

Maybe what we have become adjusted to doesn’t have to be the end of the story.

Maybe justice can be done for the poor and the broken after all.

Maybe the proud have been scattered in the imaginations of their hearts after all.

It may well be that the powerful have been brought down from their high thrones and those of low estate have been lifted up.

Maybe the hungry have been filled with good things and the rich have been sent away empty.

Maybe all of this Gospel story is true after all!..

And it is in this silence between "Mary" and "Rabbouni" that we are given to think about all these extraordinary things.

----------------------------------

Finally, let me close my Easter morning blog post with a nod to our new Catholic pope, who has   chosen to emulate St. Francis of  Assisi, another accessible life story .

Make me an channel of your peace ...

Where there is hatred, let me bring your love.

Where there is injury, your pardon, Lord; and

Where there is doubt, true faith in you.

 

Make me an channel of your peace ...

Where there is despair in life, let me bring hope;

Where there is darkness, only light; and

Where there is sadness, ever joy.

Lord Master, grant that I may never seek ...

so much to be consoled, as to console.

To be understood, as to understand...

to be loved, as to love with all my soul.

 

Make me an channel of your peace ....

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

In giving of ourselves that we receive.

and in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Lord Master, grant that I may never seek ...

so much to be consoled, as to console.

To be understood, as to understand...

to be loved, as to love with all my soul.

From the Easter morning in-box:

All I need to know

I learned from the Easter Bunny:

LOVE THE LORD THY GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART!

Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Everyone needs a friend who is all ears.

There's no such thing as too much candy.

All work and no play can make you a basket case.

A cute tail attracts a lot of attention.

Everyone is entitled to a bad hare day.

Let happy thoughts multiply like rabbits.

Some body parts should be floppy.

Keep your paws off of other people's jelly beans.

Good things come in small, sugar coated packages.

The grass is always greener in someone else's basket.

To show your true colors, you have to come out of the shell.

The best things in life are still sweet and gooey.

May the joy of the season fill your heart.

AND MAY GOD BLESS YOU!

Happy Easter!

Leveling the Playing Field.

Why not... just limit the number of marital licenses granted annually in this country, similar to the way liquor licenses are regulated in plenty of communities?  Two-person, non-related "teams" of adult age would then compete for the more rare and highly desired civil license.

 (Religious denominations could continue to perform the sacrament of marriage under their own rules with no numerical restrictions on private licensing, and these unions would continue to be recognized by family, friends, and the larger community, but with no accompanying civil benefits or official recognition unless that right was won in the overall competition, open to all two-person non-related teams of adult age.)

If you win a civil license to marry but then later choose to void it, there's no getting back in line as part of another team to recompete...

If you come from a long line of happily married folks, you might get a slight credit -- legacy points -- to up your score, presuming you know how the game is played in its ups and downs.  But not so many points to disadvantage those who were not raised in stable, two-parent homes from competing honestly themselves....

Some of the challenges in the competition could involve child-rearing -- it's 3a.m., the non-talking  baby is sick and running a fever, will NOT settle down... what do the two of you, working realistically together, do?  (points deducted for wasting time verbally or physically expressing natural frustrations, and not working together in the best interests of the sick child...)

Toss in a few financial hardship questions  (not even the rich are immune in these too-big-to-fail days) and a few 'this is not how we planned it' tests when the ideals don't match up to the realities, and you might get a decent idea of who is gonna make ... we'll find out... in the long run ...

The winners of the coveted civil prizes could live with their spouses whereever they wanted -- secure in their rights -- and would have an obligation to live up to their highly coveted 'married' status.  As in the Hunger Games, former winners could mentor future competitors to help them up their games.

Physical and sexual competitions could also be part of the game, but not so much that simple studding means a marital license.  Afterall, plenty of people can rut and reproduce, but that doesn't mean their offspring is necessarily a net contributor to society, especially where the State has to step in -- pre birth -- to fund said offspring.

Some say, more is better.
More children = more future taxpayers. 
Hmmm... hypothetically, yes.
More marital licenses = more choices, more pursuits of happiness.
Ditto.

But what if we've got it all backwards, and less is more.
If civil marriage recognitions were limited, the product would be seen as more desired and valued accordingly, one would think...

With some good honest competition -- governed by set scoring rules; none of this popularity voting skewing legitimacy -- perhaps the institution would fall into favor again and we'd begin to grow a healthier society.  What we're doing now seems not to be breeding success...

Nevermind the Constitutionality of such a plan: 
if it works in reality, it's cool. 
Everyone will just be asked to play along patiently as we limit the licenses, and study the results.

There will also be an opportunity to change the competitions as society's needs/roles evolve, as well as the opportunity to vote thumbs up or down on whether the current crop of scoring judges continue on in that role.

'No confidence'* can mean an ouster or two, and nobody gets to rest on his or her laurels. 

---------------------

* “Same-sex couples have every other right,” Chief Justice Roberts said, sounding inane for a big brain. “It’s just about the label in this case.” He continued, “If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say, ‘This is my friend,’ but it changes the definition of what it means to be a friend.”

Spring Ahead...

* The faster we're carried, the less time we have to spare.

Old times, not a bit. When old times are gone, they're not old...
they're dead.
There aren't any times
 but new times...*

~  The Magnificent Ambersons.

~ 30 ~

Rubin:
[F]aux media critics are not critics at all. They are, I am sorry to say, as much facilitators of the mainstream media’s hypocrisy as anyone. If they were really doing their jobs, they’d be saying something, if not focusing full-time, on the complete breakdown of an independent watchdog media.

And so it’s come to this: Rand Paul talking all by himself on the Senate floor. On one level, it shows the power of a single senator to make a difference. On the other hand, it is a very sad statement on the intellectual collapse of both the right and the left — and most especially of the media, whose first impulse in this administration is to circle the wagons around the White House.

The Presumption of Liberty.

Rand Paul tried. 
This is America, not Israel. 
I don't believe our educated people here will ever accept the need to live in an armed police state, where our Constitution protects individual rights and we don't have a history of scaring easily.

The Obama administration, like Cheney/Bush, believes it can rewrite those rules via fearmongering.  Plus the racial aspect -- that old document that counted black people as but a fraction of the white man's worth?  Pfft.

Rand Paul read Randy Barnett's Restoring the Lost Constitution.*

Over on the Volokh Conspiracy, early this morning, Law Professor Barnett -- originally hailing from Calumet City, Illinois -- excerpts Rand Paul's reference to his work in the now-ended filibuster.

Worth reading, the entire book, even if you think this whole Constitution thing -- what got the country this far -- is but a joke, just pretty words on paper by white racists...

Ours wasn’t perfect. Our founders allowed and left slavery to occur. Interestingly, if you read the Constitution, I think they were embarrassed by it. You know, the word “slave” doesn’t occur in our Constitution and, in fact, there were many writers, many abolitionist writers – there was a writer by the name of Lysander Spooner, who was an abolitionist, and he actually wrote about the unconstitutionality of slavery before the war. And, really, if you read the Constitution and you leave out or acknowledge that there is no word in there, slavery, and nothing that really says you have to be consigned to slavery, there are things in there that say you can’t be kept without being presented with charges. Habeas Corpus means “present the body.” In the old days in England and in different monarchies, they’d just snatch you up. If you were next in line to be king or they made you mad, they snatched you up and put you in the tower. And so they came up with the right of Habeas Corpus, you had to present the body, you had to say, he’s been arrested and these are the charges against him. We kind of have gotten, you know, to where there’s some concern in our country about that, but we had that right all along.

So Lysander Spooner wrote and said, well, you know, why shouldn’t a slave come forward and say, this guy’s keeping me, he’s telling me that I have to work for him, but I haven’t been charged with anything. What is my crime? Eventually one court case did come forward and it was ruled incorrectly. And I’m not sure how the arguments were, but in Dred Scott they ruled you can’t make the argument. But I don’t know if habeas corpus was part of that case or not but it should have been. What I’m trying to say, though, is that the rights of the Constitution, the rights of the individual that were enshrined in the Constitution are important things that democracies can’t overturn. So when you get to the Lochner case, the Lochner case in 1905. The majority rules 5-4 that the right to make a contract is part of your due process. Someone can’t deprive you of determining how long your working hours are without due process. So President Obama’s a big opponent to this, but I would ask him, among the other things I’m asking him today, to rethink the Lochner case. Because the Lochner case is really what precedes and what the – the case Buchanan v. Warley is predicated upon. Buchannan v. Worley is a case from 1917. Interestingly, it comes from my state, from Louisville, Ky. There’s a young African-American attorney by the name of William Warley. He’s a Republican, like most African-Americans were in Louisville in those days. He was the founder of the NAACP. And like most founders of the NAACP, a republican. And so what they do in 1914 is they sue because the Kentucky legislature, by majority rule, by Democratic action, passes a law saying a white person can’t sell to a black person in a white section of town or vice versa.

So this is the first case the NAACP brings up. Morefield story was the famous – I think he was the first President of the NAACP famous attorney. Him and an attorney by the name of, I think Clinton blankey. But they go forward with this case and they win the case. It actually passes overwhelmingly. But interestingly, this case to end Jim Crow is based on the Lochner decision. So those who don’t like the Lochner decision, I’d say, go back, we need to reassess Lochner In fact, there’s a good book by Bernstein from George Mason talking about rehabilitating Lochner. The thing is, is that with majority rule, if you say we’re going to give deference to majority rule or we’re going to have judicial restraint and we’re going to say, well, whatever the majority wants is fine, you set yourself up for a diminishment of rights.

I go back to the – the discussion of the Constitution limits power that is given to Congress but it doesn’t limit rights. The powers are enumerated, your rights are unenumerated. The powers given to the government are few and defined. The freedoms left to you are many and undefined. And that’s important. And what does this have to do with Lochner? The case in Lochner is whether a majority rule, a state legislature can take away your due process, your due process to contract. Can they take away your life and liberty without due process. And the court rules, no. I think it’s a wonderful decision. It expands the Fourth Amendment and says to the people that you have unenumerated rights.

Now, there’s some dissension on how we look at these cases, but when you go forward to Buchannan v. Worley, yes, the case about Jim Crow laws and housing segregation, one of the people who was going to dissent – and I think he thought better of it when he thought about he would be the first justice in probably 70-some-odd years to say that he believed in the Jim Crow laws and was upholding Jim Crow laws – was Oliver Wendell Holmes. He actually writes an opinion that has been found but was never presented to the court and he ended up voting to get rid of the Jim Crow laws. But the interesting thing is, he actually wrote an opinion in favor because he believed so strongly in majority rule.

I don’t think these questions – some may think these are idle questions. I don’t think it’s an idle question whether or not you have a democracy or a republic. I think that these questions from – that these questions from Lochner, from Buchanan v. Warley all the way to the present are important. Last year and the last couple years we had two cases on gun rights, the second amendment. These are called Heller and McDonald. Both of them I think can be seen as – once again an expansion of the Fourth Amendment to say, your privileges and immunities, which are part of the Fourth Amendment, include the Second Amendment and they include certain rights. In fact, I think any power or any right not given up to the government or limited by the enumerated powers is yours. So when they say the privileges and immunities of the Fourth Amendment, I believe that means everything else. What does that mean? It means I believe in a very circumscribed view for government.

Now, one of the side benefits of having a circumscribed view of the government would be a government that’s not allowed to do much wouldn’t get in many problems. For example, if your government wasn’t allowed to spend money that it didn’t – that it didn’t have or if your money wasn’t – your government wasn’t allowed to spend money on programs that were not enumerated as being within the purview of the federal government, you wouldn’t have these massive deficits. We would have never gotten in this fix if we believed in a republic and not a democracy.

Now what proof do I have that the current officials believe in democracy versus republic? When Obamacare came forward – you know, the – the comments from then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi were, a majority passed this. You know? We passed this by a majority. It’s the law. Why would anybody question the Constitutionality? The President said the same thing. The President said, look, a majority passed this. What right has the court to overturn this?

The question has been written about by many I think brilliant scholars who have – have looked at the Constitution and looked at what it means. Some of this has to do with whether or not you presume liberty – Randy Barnett’s written about this, “Restoring the Constitution,” – whether you have a presumption of liberty or whether you have a presumption of Constitutionality. And that may sound a little esoteric. What does that mean? It’s whether or not when they pass a law up here, you just presume it’s fine because it’s the law and the judges should give deference to it because it was a law. So this is kind of confusing because you think, oh, I’m arguing for judicial activism. In a way, I kind of am. Because if the Congress usurps the Constitution, if the Congress takes away from your rights, the judges should stop them in their tracks. I’m not arguing for deference to the legislature. I’m arguing for deference to the Constitution.

And so I’m also arguing that there is a presumption of liberty. This goes back to the – the – the way we want to look at the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment says that we have unenumerated rights. It says that basically, you know, or – I guess by extension, when you go from the Fourth Amendment to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments is the best way to look at this. The Fourth Amendment talks about privileges and immunities and then when you look at what the Ninth and Tenth Amendments do, they say, you know, those powers not given to government, those freedoms you didn’t relinquish or those powers you didn’t give to the government are left to the states and the people respectively. And it says they’re not to be disparaged. I’ve always – always loved the way that was worded. Not to be disparaged. Not only is the federal government not to trample on your rights, they are not to be disparaged. But these rights are unlimited. They’re yours. You got them from your creator. These are natural born rights and no democracy should be able to take these away from you.
 

------------------------
*Book description:

The U.S. Constitution found in school textbooks and under glass in Washington is not the one enforced today by the Supreme Court. In Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy Barnett argues that since the nation's founding, but especially since the 1930s, the courts have been cutting holes in the original Constitution and its amendments to eliminate the parts that protect liberty from the power of government. From the Commerce Clause, to the Necessary and Proper Clause, to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, to the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has rendered each of these provisions toothless. In the process, the written Constitution has been lost.

Barnett establishes the original meaning of these lost clauses and offers a practical way to restore them to their central role in constraining government: adopting a "presumption of liberty" to give the benefit of the doubt to citizens when laws restrict their rightful exercises of liberty. He also provides a new, realistic and philosophically rigorous theory of constitutional legitimacy that justifies both interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning and, where that meaning is vague or open-ended, construing it so as to better protect the rights retained by the people.

As clearly argued as it is insightful and provocative, Restoring the Lost Constitution forcefully disputes the conventional wisdom, posing a powerful challenge to which others must now respond.

Poseur Alert.

Let me just say,
I'm always wary of those who claim to be voracious readers, but are poor spellers.  Something just doesn't add up ...

Being a physically big man, soft spoken perhaps, and able to populate an anonymous comments community on a blog perhaps seems like something big -- but will real readers read uncritically?   Is  there really such a dearth of well educated and professionally trained black reporters, journalists and writers on the job market these days?

Something doesn't add up to me*, on hearing reading that the NYT offered this gentleman a twice-weekly, column-writing gig, based solely on his blog, "long form" work, and guest columns. 

Hmm...  what am I missing here?

 

-----------------------

At 37, Mr. Coates is the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States. His Atlantic essays, guest columns for The New York Times and blog posts are defined by a distinct blend of eloquence, authenticity and nuance. And he has been picking up fans in very high places.

Nelson Fernandez, Jim Fallows, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Fans like Rachel Maddow, who tweeted: “Don’t know, if in US commentary, there is a more beautiful writer than Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg described him as “one of the most elegant and sharp observers of race in America,” when announcing that Mr. Coates had won the 2012 prize for commentary from The Sidney Hillman Foundation.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who recently hosted a book reading at MIT with Mr. Coates, a visiting professor at the school, said that “he is as fine a nonfiction writer as anyone working today.”

Without a Ph.D., Mr. Coates is an uncommon visiting professor at MIT. In fact, he doesn’t even have a college degree, having dropped out of Howard University, failing both British and American literature. Before that, he failed 11th-grade English.

“If you had told me he would be a big deal, I would have said, ‘Get real,’” said Times media critic David Carr. Mr. Coates’s first writing gig was at the Washington City Paper, where Mr. Carr was his editor. “He needed work. He was not a great speller. He wasn’t terrific with names. And he wasn’t all that ambitious.”

Indeed, it was an inauspicious beginning.

The article that launched Mr. Coates toward stardom, his first for The Atlantic, came on the heels of his departure from Time. In that piece, “This Is How We Lost to the White Man,” Mr. Coates situated Bill Cosby’s attention-getting criticisms of black men within the tradition of African-American self-help conservatism championed by Booker T. Washington.

Published in 2008, the article was well-received and eventually included in the collection Best African American Essays 2010. And yet, it almost was never printed. Mr. Coates had started working on the piece the previous year, when he was at Time, and it was rejected by several publications before Mr. Coates asked Mr. Carr if he knew of a home for it. The Atlantic editor James Bennet was receptive.

“I’m very grateful to both those guys,” said Mr. Coates, who was inked to a blog deal by The Atlantic soon after the article came out, “but it shows the power of that networking. I couldn’t help notice that it was one well-placed white dude talking to another well-placed white dude to get it published.”

Ideas about race and racial identity have always been with Mr. Coates. He was introduced to the writing world by his father, a former Black Panther and Vietnam vet who ran an Afrocentric publishing house out of the family’s home in West Baltimore. “I was surrounded by books and ideas. We literally had the machinery for creating books in our basement,” said Mr. Coates, who is tall but carries himself casually. (In his Atlantic author photo, he sports thick black-framed glasses and a driving cap, which is what he wore on the day we met as well.)
...
And while it must be said that Mr. Coates’s memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, fails in pulling off the delicate balance between remembrance and braggadocio, the book does advance a theme that has underscored much of his work—that the dismissal of hip-hop as merely “a symbol of the decline of the West if ever there was one,” as the National Review recently argued, is only a subtler form of the same lazy ignorance that runs through centuries of racist stereotypes of young black men.

“I learned about writing from hip-hop,” he said.
...
The Times asked him to become a regular columnist, but Mr. Coates rejected the most coveted real estate in American journalism. He would not comment on the matter, but recently wrote on his blog about the difficulties of writing a twice-a-week Times op-ed column. He suggested that he would be taxed writing so frequently at such length, and feared his writing would suffer.

“I won’t go so far as to say I’d fail,” he wrote. “But I strongly suspect that the same people who were convinced this would be a perfect marriage, would—inside of a year—be tweeting, ‘Remember when that dude could actually write?’”

I was really taken aback by the praise and appreciation
in this article. Writing is not like performing. There's no one else there with you. I type into a box, and if I am lucky, some number of people--most of whom I will never meet--read it. I hope they like what they see. But for the most part, I'll never know, so I don't much think about it. But when prominent praise does come, it is nice and it does feels good to be acknowledged.
...

This is not false modesty. I think I am fine writer. And when I am done I hope they put the sword on my chest and send me off to Valhalla. (Mad mixed metaphors and mythology. Work with me here.) But I came up reading people do this thing in all kinds of wondrous ways. If you like what you see here. If you think it's the best writing "on the subject of race," I would encourage you read more "on the subject of race," and particularly read more black writers period.

I hope this doesn't come off as disrespect or even chiding for Jordan Michael Smith. He was the consumate professional. Just consider this a footnote.

Ask not for whom the Bell Tolls ...

...
There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is.

The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that this occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.

If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.
 

~ John Donne

---------------------------

...

The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads. I had considered reading from this book, but, for the sake of time," [flips through the pages, which are numerous] "I will just leave it as a recommendation.

It reads easily, it is a very good book, I'm sure Madame [President] you are familiar with it. It appears in English, in Russian, in Arabic, in German. I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house.

The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house.

"And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here." [crosses himself] "And it smells of sulfur still today.

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.

I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday's statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.
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the American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its system of domination. And we cannot allow them to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated.
The world parent's statement -- cynical, hypocritical, full of this imperial hypocrisy from the need they have to control everything.

They say they want to impose a democratic model. But that's their democratic model. It's the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that's imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons.

What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it or others who are at the root of democracy.

What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs?

The president of the United States, yesterday, said to us, right here, in this room, and I'm quoting, "Anywhere you look, you hear extremists telling you can escape from poverty and recover your dignity through violence, terror and martyrdom."

Wherever he looks, he sees extremists. And you, my brother -- he looks at your color, and he says, oh, there's an extremist. Evo Morales, the worthy president of Bolivia, looks like an extremist to him.

The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It's not that we are extremists. It's that the world is waking up. It's waking up all over. And people are standing up.

I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of your days as a nightmare because the rest of us are standing up, all those who are rising up against American imperialism, who are shouting for equality, for respect, for the sovereignty of nations.

Yes, you can call us extremists, but we are rising up against the empire, against the model of domination.

The president then -- and this he said himself, he said: "I have come to speak directly to the populations in the Middle East, to tell them that my country wants peace."

That's true. If we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, what does this country want? Does it want peace? They'll say yes.

But the government doesn't want peace. The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war.

It wants peace. But what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela -- new threats against Venezuela, against Iran?

He spoke to the people of Lebanon. Many of you, he said, have seen how your homes and communities were caught in the crossfire. How cynical can you get? What a capacity to lie shamefacedly. The bombs in Beirut with millimetric precision?

This is crossfire? He's thinking of a western, when people would shoot from the hip and somebody would be caught in the crossfire.

This is imperialist, fascist, assassin, genocidal, the empire and Israel firing on the people of Palestine and Lebanon. That is what happened. And now we hear, "We're suffering because we see homes destroyed.'

The president of the United States came to talk to the peoples -- to the peoples of the world. He came to say -- I brought some documents with me, because this morning I was reading some statements, and I see that he talked to the people of Afghanistan, the people of Lebanon, the people of Iran. And he addressed all these peoples directly.

And you can wonder, just as the president of the United States addresses those peoples of the world, what would those peoples of the world tell him if they were given the floor? What would they have to say?

And I think I have some inkling of what the peoples of the south, the oppressed people think. They would say, "Yankee imperialist, go home." I think that is what those people would say if they were given the microphone and if they could speak with one voice to the American imperialists.

And that is why, Madam President, my colleagues, my friends, last year we came here to this same hall as we have been doing for the past eight years, and we said something that has now been confirmed -- fully, fully confirmed.

I don't think anybody in this room could defend the system. Let's accept -- let's be honest. The U.N. system, born after the Second World War, collapsed. It's worthless.

Oh, yes, it's good to bring us together once a year, see each other, make statements and prepare all kinds of long documents, and listen to good speeches, like Abel's yesterday, or President Mullah's . Yes, it's good for that.

And there are a lot of speeches, and we've heard lots from the president of Sri Lanka, for instance, and the president of Chile.

But we, the assembly, have been turned into a merely deliberative organ. We have no power, no power to make any impact on the terrible situation in the world. And that is why Venezuela once again proposes, here, today, 20 September, that we re-establish the United Nations.
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Yesterday, the secretary general practically gave us his speech of farewell. And he recognized that over the last 10 years, things have just gotten more complicated; hunger, poverty, violence, human rights violations have just worsened. That is the tremendous consequence of the collapse of the United Nations system and American hegemonistic pretensions.
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Madam, Venezuela a few years ago decided to wage this battle within the United Nations by recognizing the United Nations, as members of it that we are, and lending it our voice, our thinking.

Our voice is an independent voice to represent the dignity and the search for peace and the reformulation of the international system; to denounce persecution and aggression of hegemonistic forces on the planet.
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The imperium is afraid of truth, is afraid of independent voices. It calls us extremists, but they are the extremists.
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Over and above all of this, Madam President, I think there are reasons to be optimistic. A poet would have said "helplessly optimistic," because over and above the wars and the bombs and the aggressive and the preventive war and the destruction of entire peoples, one can see that a new era is dawning.

As Silvio Rodriguez says, the era is giving birth to a heart. There are alternative ways of thinking. There are young people who think differently. And this has already been seen within the space of a mere decade. It was shown that the end of history was a totally false assumption, and the same was shown about Pax Americana and the establishment of the capitalist neo-liberal world. It has been shown, this system, to generate mere poverty. Who believes in it now?

What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceanea. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision.

We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world.
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We want ideas to save our planet, to save the planet from the imperialist threat. And hopefully in this very century, in not too long a time, we will see this, we will see this new era, and for our children and our grandchildren a world of peace based on the fundamental principles of the United Nations, but a renewed United Nations.

And maybe we have to change location. Maybe we have to put the United Nations somewhere else; maybe a city of the south.
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It smells of sulfur here, but God is with us and I embrace you all.

May God bless us all. Good day to you.

~ Hugo Chavez
Address to the UN
New York
September 20, 2006
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* photo by Spencer Platt, Getty Images.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez moments before addressing the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, 2006 at the UN in New York City.