I write in support of John Conyers' House Resolution 635 to Create a Special Committee to Investigate Impeachable Offenses by the Bush Administration. For I feel that, today, we are being asked by time and fate and circumstance to declare our purpose and our allegiance.
It's all a bit ironic for me. When I was a teenager, I refused to stand up and speak the Pledge of Allegiance with my classmates. It happened one morning, and all at once, when I realized I was simply following the movements of the Crowd; when I realized my own heart said something else. I was not invested in this mindless, daily flow of inertia. I was not empassioned to stand with everyone, and dully spew words that nobody thought about, or cared for. Did even the teachers believe in what they were doing? I did not. And so, I remained mute. Because I will move when my heart is invested in motion, not when I am ordered to move.
Today, I still do not believe in going along with the Crowd in blind allegiance. But today, it is the Crowd standing mute. Today, the Crowd mouths words they do not even believe or think too much about, echoing unreliable media and a duplicitous administration. Today, we are pressured to stand when the rest do, and to sit when all others sit. But John Conyers is the patriot; John Conyers, and HR 635 ask us to change the New Orwellian status quo that ambitiously grapples with its spindly, knotted fingers to pervert the very core of American Ideal. John Conyers' HR 635 suggests an old type of America, the one that came long before my dull childhood rituals; the type of America that rallied in the night to dump tea into the harbor. HR 635 suggests a return to the days of ideal, the days when Liberty was more than the name of a torture camp; the days when Freedom was not an appellation we slapped on fried potatoes because we were moving violently, and unilaterally, alienating other countries (like the one that gave us the Statue of Liberty); the days when no one man was above the law.
Note: I did fix typos and change a word or two between sending this to the paper, and posting it online. -JRH
