Saturday, December 12, 2015

"The world is better because . . . [she] lived in it."




At sundown this evening, we lit the Yahrzeit candle for my mother, who passed away a year ago at the age of 95.  She was a wonderful and great woman.

Since all of our immediate family were here Thanksgiving Weekend, we went to visit the cemetery together.  Bobbi chose this very appropriate and meaningful portion from the Reform Yom Kippur memorial service to read at her gravesite.  I thought I would share it:

"If some messenger were to come to us with the offer that death should be overthrown, but with the one inseparable condition that birth should also cease; if the existing generation were given the chance to live for ever, but on the clear understanding that never again would there be a child, or a youth, or first love, never again new persons with new hopes, new ideas, new achievements; ourselves for always and never any others – could the answer be in doubt?

"We shall not fear the summons of death; we shall remember those who have gone before us, and those who will come after us!

"Let us treasure the time we have, and resolve to use it well, counting each moment precious – a chance to apprehend some truth, to experience some beauty, to conquer some evil, to relieve some suffering, to love and be loved, to achieve something of lasting worth.

"Help us then, to fulfill the promise that it is in each of us, and so to conduct ourselves that, generations hence, it will be true to say of us: The world is better because, for a brief space, they lived in it."

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Heschel Vision Award: Jews United for Justice, October 25, 2015

On October 25, 2015, I was honored by Jews United for Justice with a Heschel Vision Award.  Below is what JUFJ wrote about me, and here is the link to the video of my son Mike's presentation to me, and my remarks.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZeDsxNTxDc

And a picture of Mike and me:

MEET THE HONOREES


David Fishback, Advocacy Chair of the Metro DC Chapter of PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), is a long-time activist who draws from his Jewish roots in advocating for social justice.
For more than a dozen years, David has been a major force in Montgomery County on LGBT issues. In 2002, a few years after their sons came out as gay, David and his wife, Bobbi, established the Temple Emanuel Kulanu Committee for LGBT outreach and inclusion. That same year, the Montgomery County Board of Education appointed David to its Citizens Advisory Committee on Family Life and Human Development. After being elected chair of that Committee, he led the effort to revise the MCPS health education curriculum to include accurate information on LGBT matters. Over vociferous opposition by right-wing groups, that campaign achieved full victory in 2014.
David has also been a champion for LGBT rights in the state of Maryland, helping create the JUFJ Dream for Equality Coalition to secure victory in the 2012 state referenda on the Dream Act and Civil Marriage Equality, and serving on the Advisory Board of Gender Rights Maryland. David is now active with PFLAG on a national level, presenting workshops at PFLAG’s national conventions and assisting chapters across the country regarding health education curriculum matters. His Curriculum Victory in Montgomery County, Maryland: A Case Study and Handbook for Action was web-published by PFLAG last month.
The product of a Workmen’s Circle family, steeped in principles of social justice in the Jewish tradition, David began organizing social justice programs as an undergraduate at The George Washington University and served as a VISTA Volunteer in Memphis, TN, in 1969-70. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1973 and working on Democratic Party reform issues in 1971 and 1972, he began a 40 year career in federal service, retiring in 2013 from the Department of Justice, where, among other things, he successfully defended the United States against attempts by manufacturers of asbestos products and Agent Orange to shift billions of dollars of their tort liability onto the federal taxpayers.
David has also been a local education advocate since serving as co-president of the Rosemary Hills Primary School PTA from 1984-86, where he led the successful effort to renovate and expand that magnet integration school to keep it viable. In the late 1990s, David organized the successful campaign to save from devastating budget cuts the MCPS magnet and signature programs at Richard Montgomery and Montgomery Blair High Schools and Takoma Park and Eastern Middle Schools.
Here I am with my fellow honorees, Nikki Lewis, Barbara Kraft, and Roberta Ritvo:  


Thursday, December 3, 2015

Student Commencement Speeches 1969




Hillary Rodham and Senator Edwin Brooke, May 31, 1969

Recently, the Daily Kos published an item on Hillary Rodham Clinton's student commencement address at Wellesley College on May 31, 1969, when she challenged the main speaker, Senator Edwin Brooke .  I think that, in many cases, seeing what a person was thinking at the age of 21 may give us a good sense of the person’s best, authentic self.

To test my hypothesis, I dug into an old trunk in my basement to find the text of the student address I gave a few days later at my graduation from The George Washington University.  That evening, the main speaker was Senator Edmund Muskie. (Picture below, with Senator Muskie, June 8, 1969)       

I did not challenge Senator Muskie by name; rather, I sought to challenge my fellow students – along with our entire society.  While I find some of my phrasing a bit hokey, tied to the idioms of the period, and while I would write it a bit differently now (I now think that our Vietnam Era foreign policy problems were more the fault of our civilian leaders and the defense industry than they were the military itself; and I would have been clearer that it was not just seeds of racism that were planted centuries ago, but that much of our country was based on racism – our country’s Original Sin, as I called it in a student newspaper column the previous year),  I would like to believe that it is a 46-year look back to my essential self.   

Anyway, I re-keyboarded it, and copy it here for my own family posterity.  Anyone else interested to reading it, is of course, free to do so.

GWU Student Commencement Speech (David Fishback), June 8, 1969

Today we receive diplomas from a university. The world appears far different from the time, only a few years ago, when we were handed diplomas by our high school principals. 

The world of 1964 and '65 was bright and optimistic. A few cities had erupted, but that was, we were told, a small side product of realistically rising expectations. The Government was sending some men to fight in a war in Southeast Asia, but that was, we were told, a small price to pay for the preservation of "freedom" in Asia. The Nation was making ready to uproot the last vestiges of injustice in what was to become a Great Society. 

Somehow we did not make it. A portion of our population is in incipient rebellion, not because of simple rising expectations, but because of disgust and anger and continued oppression.  The intervention in Asia has devastated a small land whose people, faced with authoritarianism from all sides, must only desire peace; the brutality of this now clearly senseless war has not only crippled the people of Vietnam, but has and continues to tear our own nation apart.  And rather than working to eliminate injustice, the Nation seems paralyzed in any attempts to deal with any problems. 

It would be ludicrous to speak of ourselves as young people now entering the society:  We have been in it for quite awhile. Some of us are extremely sensitive to the crises around us; some of us are relatively unconcerned. But the War and the draft and the domestic upheavals prevent any of us from being completely oblivious to them -- and perhaps that is a silver lining. To the extent we are born into a society, we have no responsibility for its shortcomings; but to the extent we live in it, we have total responsibility. The results of racism, poverty, and militarism threaten to explode or decay our society beyond repair. 

Some say that the problems can be solved simply by stern measures to maintain order:  To keep protesting people in their place, to give them no choice but to play in the game, albeit with a stacked deck. That is no solution:  As John Kennedy so wisely pointed out, "Those who make change impossible make revolution inevitable."

But then others say that revolution is what we need:  By revolution here is meant complete overthrow of the existing order, which, in the context of the conditions in this country, can only be done by violence. In our society this approach is dubious at its best, catastrophic at its worst:  A repressive fascistic counter-revolution would be virtually certain, and even if it were not, the dynamics of violent revolution lead almost inexorably to authoritarian or totalitarian regimes -- and such regimes, by their very nature, are likely to be most oppressive in industrialized and heterogeneous societies like ours.  

Nor will the crises of our time "blow over."  The seeds of racism were planted in this country hundreds of years ago and its trees grew and multiplied:  Today racism's poisonous fruit, which has always sickened our society, threatens to kill it.  Poverty, closely tied to racism, but going beyond it, has become clearer in its inequities:  People are increasingly unlikely to tolerate conditions of poverty imposed by circumstances beyond their control. The increasing influence of the military has led us into a catastrophic wake and could easily, if unchecked, lead us -- by sheer momentum -- to more such wars, harming ourselves and others and taking us down the road to a nuclear holocaust. 

So the alternatives are clear:  We either find humanitarian solutions to these crises or the crises will plunge us downward into an abyss of right or left wing authoritarianism or total annihilation. A social, economic, and political system can survive only if it meets the needs of its people. If our system does not deliver, it will die. 

Our society, for all its grave deficiencies, has much to offer and has great potential:  Prosperity, rich diversity, respect for human rights are possible within its broadest outlines. Shifts – fundamental shifts -- within the system will be required, and we must not shrink from that change. 

A very natural question at this point is, "What power have I to change things?"  The answer I would give is that very few people have power as individuals. But, as we are molded in large numbers by our society, in large numbers we have the capacity to mold the society in turn. People's attitudes create the climate of opinion in which change can take place; and the ballot box is still the ultimate repository of power. But public opinion is only a potent force if it is organized:  To that end we must "get our heads in place," "get ourselves together" to organize for change. 


Youth is always proclaimed to be the wave of the future. Well, we're it. In the final analysis it will be us and people like us who will determine whether this nation descends into more chaos and more repression or whether it develops into a truly just and truly free society. It is our responsibility -- the responsibility of each and every one of us.