Here is the text of my speech delivered to the Liberian Community - TopicsExpress



          

Here is the text of my speech delivered to the Liberian Community Association of Dallas-Forth Worth, Texas, to mark our 167th independence anniversary. Let me say a big thank you to the community for inviting me to speak to them--and what a program they had. There were about 500 people packed into the hall. The program was well-planned and excuted; great entertainment, wonderful food, and just a fantastic time. Congratulations to President Stanley Gaye, his Vice President, Miatta Dennis and the other corps of officers of LCA--Dallas-Forth Worth Independence Day Speech Delivered by Kwame Clement to the Liberian Community Association of Dallas Forth Worth Mr. President, officers, and members of the Liberia Community Association of Dallas/Fort Worth, my fellow Liberians, ladies and gentlemen. I am extremely delighted to join you today in celebrating the 167th independence anniversary of the noble experiment called Liberia. As we celebrate this historic day, we cannot but admit that a deep sense of despair and despondency pervades Liberian communities across the world. It is despair and despondency born of a string of seemingly never-ending bad news—the plague of Ebola that now stalks our native land; the massive failure of students--thirty thousands of them--taking university entrance exams; the news that many at the very highest levels of our government have been denied entry into the United States. At times like these, it is easy for us to lose faith in our country. It is easy for us to think things can never get better; that they can only get worse. I disagree. In spite of all the bad news, I am bullish on Liberias future. I believe our best days are ahead of us. In reaching this conclusion, I draw inspiration from the lives of our national heroes--men who never lost faith in the noble experiment called Liberia; men who sacrificed all they had and put their personal fortunes, even their lives, on the line as they fought to build our country and make it a better place. Take the case of two men, Lott Cary and Didhwo Twe who were born about 100 years apart. Lott Cary was born in 1780 in Virginia, the United States of America. Because his father was a slave, Lott was born into slavery and owned by the man who owned his father. For the same reasons, Lotts own children were also born into slavery. Through hard work and enterprise, Lott was able in 1813 to save $850 to purchase his freedom and the freedom of his children. $850 in 1813 was not an insignificant sum of money-- it is about $12,500 in today’s dollars. That was not a small undertaking for a man who was a slave and whose wages had to go to his master. He did not have the benefit of a real formal education. Yet he rose to become a lay physician and leading preacher in Virginia. In January 1821, he set sail for what was then the commonwealth of Liberia. By now, he had acquired property in Virginia and was relatively a well-to-do man. He had no reason to leave the comforts he had known in America and brave the Atlantic for a strange and unknown land in Africa. In fact, his employers valued him so much that they promised to give him a salary increase of $200 a year, if he abandoned his plan to leave. He refused. He was bound to go. Why did he choose to go? Here is what he said. I am an African, and in this country, however meritorious my conduct, and respectable my character, I cannot receive the credit due to either. I wish to go to a country where I shall be estimated by my merits, not by my complexion; and I feel bound to labor for my suffering race. (Note that a hundred and forty years later in his 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech, Dr. martin Luther King will essentially copy Lott Cary when the civil rights leader he spoke about wanting his children to live in a country where they “will be judged not be the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”) Driving home the self-evident truth that in taking such a momentous decision, he was acting not to benefit himself, Cary further stated: This step is not taken to promote my own fortune. I have counted the cost and have sacrificed all my worldly possessions to this undertaking. It may be that I shall behold you no more on this side of the grave, but I feel bound to labor for my brothers, perishing as they are in the far distant land of Africa. For their sake and for Christs sake I am happy in leaving all and venturing all. And how much Liberia needed him. He would serve not just as a preacher, but also as a lay physician. He would challenge the ACS when he thought they were not putting the interest of the colonists first. He would build the first church in Liberia--providence Baptist Church. An eye witness to Carys service to his adopted country and people spoke of “his unbending integrity, adding, the benevolence of We see him when almost all around him are sick or dying, visiting from house to house, not only administering consolation as a servant of Christ, but in the character of a physician and nurse. These services too, were performed without the prospect of compensation. No wonder his memory lives on in many ways today. Lott Cary Mission School, in Brewerville and Cary Street in Monrovia bear his name. But so great were his self-less accomplishments that even here in the United States his name is etched in history. Lott Cary Road in Charles County, Virginia, the place of his birth, bears his name. In Richmond, the capital of Virginia, there is a Cary Street named after him. There is also a Carytown Shopping Center in Richmond that is named in honor of this great Liberian. The House in which he was born, now known as Lott Cary House, is a historic landmark in Virginia. Since 1980, it has been on the United States National Register of Historic Places. More recently, James City County in Virginia declared March 21, 2001 to be Lott Cary Day in tribute to this man who graced the place we call home--Liberia. Imaging what we would be as a country today if we had just 10 Lott Carys. As you ponder that, imagine too, what our country would be like if we had many Didwho Twe’s. Twe was born in 1879, just about a hundred years after the birth of Lott Cary. Like Lott Cary, Twe was driven to improve his lot by hard work. Like Lott Cary, Twe was also willing and ready to sacrifice everything, even his life, to build a just society that embraced all of its people. His interest in improving his lot would catch the eye of a U.S. Congressman, who in 1894 arranged for Twe to come here to the United States to pursue further education. After studying at various American institutions of higher learning and obtaining a master’s degree from Rhode Island University, Twe returned home in 1910 to help build his country. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1927, Twe sought to put an end to the practice of forced labor--a practice under which Liberians were forcibly made to work for little or nothing in what is today Equatorial Guinea. He would meet strong resistance. Undaunted, he helped lead the effort to present to the Secretary General of the League of Nations evidence about the practice of forced labor--which, as we know, ultimately led to resignations of President C.D.B. King and his Vice President Allen Yancy. This so enraged the powers that be, they expelled from the House of Representatives and charged him with sedition, forcing this great son of Liberia to flee the country for Sierra Leone. Twe returned home later and in 1951, challenged President Tubman in the election for the presidency. Once again he was forced to flee Liberia for his life as leaders of the political class sought to deal once and for all with this man who was a nagging source of trouble for them. So what do the lives of these men teach us? What lessons do we draw from their great stories? Their life stories, I submit, reveal a number of basic truths that should guide us. The first truth that is evident from their life stories is that the practices and policies that tend to put government on the side of a few in the long run breed national distrust, disunity and even chaos; that our country is stronger when there is opportunity for all, when we reward those who work hard and play by the rules; that poverty diminishes us all, and that the least in our society deserves our special attention and protection. There is one more truth we need to confront today. This truth, exemplified by the emphasis on self-reliance and self-improvement that was the hallmarks of Lott Carys life, is that our country cannot be dependent forever on foreign aid—aid, no matter how generous can never provide us the wherewithal for sustained economic growth to lift our people out of poverty. It may ameliorate some of the worst effects of poverty; it cannot do away with poverty. To lift ourselves out of poverty, we must grow our economy. To grow our economy, we must focus on giving priority to spending that supports growth. That means we must continue to invest in better roads, health and in those other areas, such as agricultural development, that spur growth. It means we must focus on education so that the poorest in our country can enjoy the benefits of the sort of education the well-off enjoys. It means investing heavily in our universities and colleges. It means doing the things necessary, including ensuring we have an independent and free judiciary, respect for the rule of law, and the sanctity of contract, to make Liberia attractive to foreign investment. And by an independent and free judiciary, we mean a judicial system in which the merits of legal arguments and not the depth of one’s pockets determine the outcome of court cases. A related truth we must confront is that government cannot be the answer to all our problems. We as individual Liberians must rise to the task. We must contribute to charity, and other causes. Organized charity work is not a big part of our culture. But those of us who have come to the United States and seen how organized charity can help improve lives, must begin to be involved in such work on behalf of Liberia and Liberians. Such charity is desperately needed as we take on the scourge of Ebola. We cannot like Cary go about tending to those who are sick. But we can help raise funds to fight this disease and to help the families, the widows, and the orphans of its victims. The funds we raise may help provide first responders who are trained to respond to outbreak of the disease and inform people in their local languages about how to prevent its spread. These may be small efforts in the grand scheme of things, but they will not doubt help the work of the health care professionals, including representatives of the World Health Organization, and the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) who we understand are now on the ground in Liberia as part of a coordinated international effort to take on this killer disease. We hope and trust that our government will fully work with them to contain the spread of this contagion. Yet another truth made so obvious by the life of Didhwo Twe we must confront today is that politics should not serve to divide us. That at its best, politics is not a zero sum game where someone wins all and the other loses all. Rather, politics should be about bringing out the best in us. Sure, we will fight elections with the goal of winning, but at the end of the day, we must be guided by the realization that the national interest should not be subordinate to our individual political interests—that reaching broad compromises on key issues and developing a national consensus on where we want to go as a people, is crucial to moving our country forward. Certainly, therefore, we will have differences in our partisan political outlooks, for the political party, as they say, is a reservoir of social thought, with people of differing shades of social thought gravitating towards the party that best accommodates them. But our differences should not divide us when it comes to what is good for Liberia. Our goal should be to make Liberia safe for our differences; to build a society capable of tolerating our diversity of political views. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common attribute is that we are all Liberians, we come from a common patrimony and we all want to build a society that our children can enjoy in peace and security. The other truth we must confront is that we cannot be wedded to and haunted by the past. The wrongs of the past are simply what they are—the wrongs of the past. We can learn from them, so that we do not repeat them. However, our lives and the lives of our fellow Liberians cannot be measured by them; they should not cloud our ability to see the possibilities of the present and the promises of the future. In short, our purpose should not be to claim the victory or to fix the blame for the past. Instead, it should be to fix the course for the future. Yet another truth revealed by the life stories of Twe and Lott Cary is that without debate, without criticism, no government can succeed. So let there be the most vibrant but civil debate about our country and its future. Let us resist the temptation to confuse debate and criticism with disloyalty and betrayal. In that connection, let us realize and uphold the role of a free and uninhibited press as a true guarantor of democracy. Freedom of the speech means tolerating even speech with which we disagree. A free press that shines the bright sun rays of fair and objective reporting as a disinfectant on the processes of government is the best guarantor we have for building a society that abides by the rule of law and shuns all form of corruption that corrodes the basic values that undergird our society. Finally there is the self-evident truth that we are more than a mere collection of tribes; we are a nation. As they say, great families produce great clans, great clans produce great tribes, and great tribes produce great nations. We are a great nation. Our tribe is Liberia. Let us keep it that way and resist the temptation to pander to the destructive parochialism, divisive provincialism, and corrosive tribalism that can plant seeds of enmity that span generations. So here in Dallas/Fort Worth on this mid-summer night, let us reaffirm our commitment to the Liberian ideal. Here in Texas, home of Sam Houston and David Crockett, land of the Alamo —let us find the inspiration to make our country all it can be. Our task is difficult—made more difficult by years of war and strife. We certainly had no role in choosing the difficult times in which we live. What we can do, though, is to choose how we live in the times and circumstances fate has chosen to give us. Some may see the current Liberia with all of its problems and challenges and ask why? Let us instead see Liberia as it ought to be—a sweet land of liberty and prosperity and ask “why not”? As we do so, let us remember another of our great national heroes, Elijah Johnson, who, in many ways was the Benjamin Franklin of our country--the elder wise statesman of early Liberia. A veteran of the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain, Johnson was on the first ship, the Elizabeth that took settlers to Liberia in 1820. As the ranks of the early settlers were decimated by death and diseases, they sought to abandon the experiment to create a new nation in Africa and return to the United States. Johnson would stand firm and say: For two long years I have sought a home. Here I have found one. Here I shall remain. No statement was so crucial to our countrys founding than Johnsons. His resolve won the day and ensured we have what today we can all proudly call Liberia--our home. Like Johnson, let us not lose faith in Liberia. I know many of us are nearing the age of retirement and are wondering whether we should go ahead with plans to cash out our 401k and 403bs and go back home. Dont bet against Liberia. Liberia is our home. It will be better. We can make it better. And as we strive to do so, let us remember that in union strong, success is sure. We cannot fail. That with God above our right to prove, we will over all difficulties and development challenges prevail. With joy and gladness our country’s cause defending we meet all foes—including Ebola—with valor unpretending. Long live Liberia, happy land, a home of glorious liberty by God’s command. Thank you.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 03:07:07 +0000

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