Finneran: America The Beautiful…………..
Friday, November 14, 2014
Two stories from across two oceans lighten the world’s dark skies.
We begin in Oslo, Norway, the host city to the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual human rights gathering. The stories are riveting, appalling, frightening. I’d wager that most Americans are blissfully unaware of the world’s evil men. Jay Nordlinger of National Review writes exquisitely about the Forum (and countless other topics) every year. His “Oslo Journal” is always a fabulous read, one which awakens a deep appreciation of all that we have (and too oft take for granted) here in America. If the Globe and other Bay State newspapers are looking for important things to write about, perhaps they should pool resources and send a first rate writer to Oslo next year.
The sheer courage it takes to be a human rights activist in Communist China, in Iran, in Ecuador or Venezuela, in the Ukraine or in Cuba staggers my mind. I am quite sure that I do not possess such courage. To be beaten, tortured, and imprisoned, to be separated from one’s spouse and children, to expose family and friends to Soviet-style brutes bent on thuggish intimidation requires a courage unimaginable to me. Better to keep one’s head down and mouth shut right? Where does one find the guts to stand alone in front of a twenty-ton tank, simply in the name and service of democracy and fair elections? I suspect that most of us would simply go along clapping for the dictator of the day rather than having our teeth smashed, our daughters raped, and our sons murdered.
Here’s Nordlinger on China---“I think of Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese legal activist, who, when he ran, ran to the U.S.. Embassy in Beijing. Many, many people have run to U.S.. embassies and American soil. If we fall in the world--and fall we must, apparently—where will they run? There will be somewhere, let’s hope……….And do Americans, on left and right, still want to be a country to which people feel they can run? This is a hugely important question.”
Here’s Finneran on Nordlinger’s question---YES. YES. YES. I want to be part of a country to which people feel they can run. Call it American pride, or American courage, or American morality. Whatever it is, however flawed we might be as a nation, it’s the right thing to do and the right thing to be. Should we turn our backs, dim our lights, and lose our will, the world will be a colder and more savage place.
In this allegedly more advanced, more civilized and more enlightened twenty-first century, what is it that these activists so desperately seek in their countries? What radical ideas might trigger the cruelty and violence which they suffer? Try the radical notion of freedom of speech. Or try the radical notion of freedom of worship. Taking a page from FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, I would add freedom from fear. As it was then so it is now that such ideas trigger lethal reactions from the world’s community of despots and dictators. May Oslo and Nordlinger and activists continue their urgent and noble work.
Courtesy of a recent Boston Globe article, our story now moves to Lowell, home to some thirty thousand Cambodian immigrants and their children. Last Tuesday, on Election Day, Rady Mom, one of those Cambodian-Americans, was elected by his neighbors and fellow citizens to the office of State Representative. Mom’s journey from Cambodia to Lowell is as improbable as America itself and as American as apple pie. His family suffered mightily in the labor camps of the Khmer Rouge, a particularly savage subset of Communist criminals who slaughtered many many thousands of Cambodians in the name of ideological purity. In the early 1980s he came to America, his family being sponsored by a Methodist Church in Duluth Minnesota. Parenthetically, I wonder what he thought of those Minnesota winters---from the tropical climes of Cambodia to the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, all of them frozen solid……………….
The Globe article quotes the new Representative describing his entry into American life as follows---“I didn't’t speak a word of English”. That’s quintessentially American. The Globe further quotes a friend and campaign supporter, Mr. Sambath Soum, a public school teacher, who framed it beautifully—“We are Americans and we have the right to choose the people we want to lead us……………….” That’s quintessentially American too. It’s America the Beautiful at its very best.
A strong woman stands in New York Harbor offering these words to all who approach----
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp above the golden door!”
America the Beautiful indeed.
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