Our human rights have been stolen. We can't let that stand.

[Cyrano]

Imagine packaging up everything you own and moving to a new country where you don’t know anyone and you don’t even speak the language. Imagine that you may never again see the land you left: the relatives, friends, neighbors, streets and buildings that combined to form the place you had always called home. And then imagine sailing into New York harbor and seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time. No one needed to translate the meaning of that statue for you. It was a symbol of all the reasons you had come here: A chance to live a decent life and, perhaps, a chance for an even better life for your children and grandchildren.

As a teenager, there were many times I’d stood on the southern tip of Manhattan Island and gazed out at that statue. And I’d also shifted my glance a bit to look at nearby Ellis Island. It was the place where perhaps twelve million immigrants had first set foot on American soil. They walked into the building on that island, with its old-world arches and towers, and emerged into the new world. My forebears, and perhaps yours, had all passed through there carrying everything they owned in the world, unsure, feeling lost and not knowing what the future held for them. But of one thing they were certain. They were in a place that didn’t have the injustices, or oppression, or horrors from which they had fled. They came because they had heard that America was a place that offered opportunity and freedom. And it did.

Today, you and I are living in a time in which those old-world injustices, oppressions and horrors have caught up with us. We went to sleep one night and woke to find that we were on a path back to the dark ages. We were all naïve enough to believe that our country was different. That we were immune to the ancient evils that have always plagued mankind. But it was an illusion.

Yesterday, George W. Bush signed a piece of paper that, for all practical purposes, destroyed our rights as human beings. The opening words of our constitution, “We the people…” have become inoperative. And we can’t let that stand.

There have always been hollow, malignant people who corrupted everything they touched and who were capable of creating only misery, pain and death in their drive to fulfill their own greed, power and desire for absolute control. But we were foolish enough to believe that it could never happen in what many viewed as “the greatest country in the world.”

In less than three weeks from today, we will (supposedly) have an opportunity to vote against George W. Bush’s enablers. But there is no guarantee our votes will be counted, or that martial law won’t be declared, or that any other imaginable tactic won’t be used to keep us from taking back, at least, a part of our government – and control of our own destinies.

I don’t know what will happen, but I do know that we owe a debt to those who came before us and to ourselves. And somehow, someway, we must find a means to repay that debt through any and all means possible. Today, the Statue of Liberty is “off limits” to "protect it from terrorists.” Or so we are told.

It’s somehow ironic that we are forbidden from entering one of the greatest symbols of our freedoms. Some of my forebears, and I’m sure some of yours, fought and died, or were disabled for life, to protect everything that statue symbolizes, as well as our rights as enumerated in the constitution. Can we do any less?