“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
As the eyes of our nation and the media are drawn to the conflict in Libya–and the broader struggles across the Middle East and brutal disasters in Japan–let us not forget those souls for whom oppression, conflict and disaster are a part of everyday life.
Let us not forget our brothers and sisters around the world whose struggle isn’t for freedom from oppression, but for freedom to breathe another day, to eat another meal, to see their children through another night.
This country, whose torch of freedom and hope still burns in New York Harbor, must never allow that light to extinguish. In the struggle for peace, we must not allow ourselves to become accepting or reliant on war, for the only way our nation, our planet and our way of life can endure is if we “beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks.”
Until we can see the world through the eyes of the poorest, the hopeless and the huddled masses–we will never be free. We must remember.
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