To the editor:
I was at the Hands Off! demonstration in Boston. During the drive home, I had time to think about the march and my personal presence in it. Perhaps it is a bit self-absorbed, but discarding that thought as, well, mind-blather, I felt that I had become part of the grand history of my country, a history that is—for all its flaws and incomplete intentions, its hypotheticals—the strongest democratic society, up to this point, that humans have ever agreed to adopt and attempted to perfect.
It was my personal joy and comfort to stand near the bandstand on the Boston Common, to be surrounded by thousands of others who believed in their power to protect and advance the intentions of this democracy. Some of us cried, some of us laughed, some sang, all of us chanted, some danced to the energizing music of a brass band. We introduced ourselves to those who stood or marched next to us—though, for my part, perhaps quite naively, I felt that I knew each and every heart as we stood together on the Common.
To get to the Common, I had to walk past the Granary Burial Ground, where Revolutionary War-era patriots, including Paul Revere, the five victims of the Boston Massacre, and three signers of the Declaration of Independence (Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Robert Treat Paine) are buried. The day was already feeling emotionally charged for me, and walking through the grounds of that cemetery, I was moved to weep for what we might lose, for which these men had risked, and some lost, their lives. They took that risk so that Americans could, as we did this April of hope, have the right to stand, on the Boston Common and thousands of other common places around our country, without fear, without being assaulted, without being arrested.
What did we accomplish? Thousands upon thousands of people of America “spoke” to the world: We are here, we are demonstrating that our democracy is strong and will remain strong, because we have something to say about that!
Linda Kaye-Moses
Dalton
Click here to read The Berkshire Edge’s policy for submitting Letters to the Editor.
