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In fall 2007, Kerry Kennedy, president of the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, spoke at the Westminster Town Hall Forum in downtown Minneapolis. Words from her forum, “Speaking Truth to Power: Heroes in Our Midst,” serve as a challenge and balm these nearly 20 years later:
“As Americans, we have a special duty to be aware of what’s going on, and to be outraged by injustice, and to speak up when we see something that is not fair.”
For 45 years the Westminster Town Hall Forum has been a space for voices of conscience to wrestle with matters of ethics and public life, affirming that there are normative moral claims and concepts that should and ought to guide our personal and public lives. Given our mission and ongoing affirmation that “Ethics Matter,” it feels especially important in this moment that we employ our voice and join the chorus of all who with grounded conscience affirm that human rights, human dignity, the rule of law, and basic principles governing civil society and our institutions all be upheld and defended.
Together with so many of you – our neighbors – we mourn the tragic death of Renee Nicole Good, and we name as wrong the actions of ICE, which is targeting and terrorizing so many of our immigrant and communities of color in Minnesota.
Ethics is not merely a philosophical exercise; rather, it is fundamentally about how we live in view of the good, the right, and the just. Ethics is about the defense of the common good and commitment to the flourishing life for all persons and the earth itself. So for all who are doing what they can to care for their neighbors, all who are seeking to remain grounded in their commitments to moral norms, and all who are calling all of us to live with moral courage, we affirm that you are a voice of conscience. As Kerry Kennedy reminds us,
“Heroes (ones who speak truth to power) are living, breathing human beings in our midst, and their determination and valor and commitment in the face of overwhelming danger challenges each of us to take up the torch for a more decent society. Today we are blessed by certain people who are gifts from God and they are teachers who show us not how to be saints, but how to be fully human."
We commend to you then some ways that you might live out your ethical commitments. (Note: These are some ways you can put your ethics into action.)
We encourage you to join us in renewed commitment to the values of democracy, human rights, and dignity of all persons. For not only do ethics matter, but so does each and every one of our neighbors.
We will end here as Kerry Kennedy did in her Forum with Langston Hughes’ poem “Let America Be America Again,” a section of which is shared below.
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
…
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
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