Speech at the Break the Silence Rally

June 13, 2005 - Break the Silence

Good evening beautiful people! Thank you for coming to this bus tour event that has such importance for our civic life together. I am honored to be one of the speakers tonight.

This morning, when dressing, I started to put on black clothes, symbolic of the sorrow I feel for the way in which my beloved country's honor is being daily besmirched. But then I thought, Nope-I'm going to wear red, white and blue because I love America, and because I know that all the people who come to this rally to break the silence about what the war in Iraq is doing to our national character and our life together are people who love America too.

We love America because of the decency and integrity of its people, people who are honest and forthright, people who care about their neighbors, people who are absolutely sickened and appalled by the reports of torture and abuse at Guantanomo and in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are people who will sacrifice for the sake of the honor of our country, and who will do everything in our power to reclaim our damaged world prestige.

You and I are Americans, exercising our rights of free speech, and the right to assemble, and the right to dissent, from those who were elected to power in 2000 and 2004. We are committed to the formation of a more perfect union, the establishment of real justice. We are they who have, in many of your cases, been those who enlisted to provide for the common defense of this nation in past times of national peril. We are also those who work day in and day out for the general welfare of our cities, towns, our farms and villages, our schools and our children. We are patriots, and don't let anybody tell you, in double-speak, that we are not.

We have come because we believe that this war in Iraq was wrong from the beginning, and that we must pressure our government with our speeches, our letters to the editor, and even if it must be, civil disobedience, to begin planning the withdrawal of our troops and the end of our occupation of that sovereign nation immediately. We are willing to work that something good may yet be redeemed from what was foisted upon us, as the British memos reveal, by manipulated intelligence.

Our nation is sick, sin-sick with greed, with the will to dominate the world, with a self-righteous arrogance that defies those who hold a differing opinion. When, I ask you, in the history of this nation, have we had a president who refused to meet, or allow in to places where he was speaking, people who disagreed with him? When? Never. Say it with me: NEVER!

When have we had an administration so gifted at dissembling, and a president who doesn't know the difference between dissembling and dis-assembling. While he dissembles about no child left behind, our education system, once the finest in the world, is gradually being disassembled. They dissemble about the Clean Air Act, when in fact they are disassembling the environmental protections that we have worked so hard to develop and are doing nothing to develop a sane energy policy. While this president dissembles to the body politic about being a compassionate conservative, this administration is ripping out the fabric of the social safety nets that have protected the dignity of our elderly and our poor. Meanwhile, the rich get richer, and the top 1/10 of one percent of the rich get massive tax relief while tax reform for the rest of us means that we pay more.

Meanwhile, the National Priorities Project estimates that the Iraq war has cost Kentuckians 1.7 billion dollars. Just imagine, Rep. Stein, what the Commonwealth of Kentucky could have done with that kind of money. And who can put a value on the lives of our Kentucky soldiers who have given their lives, their arms and legs, their faces and eyes, their goodness to this travesty of a war that we now know, from the British memos, whose genesis was manufactured and manipulated in order to make it seem legal and justified to a gullible public.

While this administration dissembles about supporting a culture of life, they dis-assemble the armed forces of this nation with inadequate armor and stop-loss measures to keep people from going home after doing their duty. While they dissemble about Terry Schiavo and always coming down on the side of life, they refuse to count the lives lost by Iraqis during this pre-emptive war, and worse, they have blocked pictures of our own honored dead as their caskets are sadly delivered back to the land of the free and the home of the brave. What kind of culture of life is that?

And here's the final straw for me: we have never had a president who so ardently claimed Jesus as an ally, who does not appear to have even a smidgen of concern about whether, as Lincoln worried, he might be, more importantly, on God's side.

The Bush administration's best skill is "shift and shaft": shift attention away from the things that we should really be upset about, and shaft the poor, the enlisted people in the military, the workers who won't get their pensions, the children, the people losing their health insurance, and even the earth itself.

Well, my friends: I have reached my limit. I will not be quiet. I will not stop protesting. This is the real American Patriot Act.

I think millions of Americans are fed up with this basic violation of our understanding of ourselves as "the good guys". Good guys don't torture prisoners. Good guys don't blame the little soldiers without holding some higher-ups really accountable. A nation of honor does not lie to a family like Pat Tillman's family about how a hero died. We don't have merely an education deficit, a health care deficit, environmental degradation, we have what is absolutely worse: an honesty deficit. This dishonors everything that has been great and good about America.

Tonight, here in this city, we break the silence, for silence is a betrayal of all that is great and good and honest and moral about our beloved country. Here we stand to assemble, not dissemble or disassemble, to ASSEMBLE real morality, real justice, real commitment to values that go beyond what people do in their bedrooms or what happens in private rooms of dying, to what they do on Wall Street, in executive board rooms, in the Pentagon, and in the Oval Office. And you know what? We are good Americans. We are CAN DO people, and we can do redeem the soul of our nation from this dissembling crowd of new robber barons now occupying the White House and the majority side in Congress.
--Nancy Jo Kemper