When they speak of our time, they will say. They will say it was a time when truth abandoned the word, and when running sores passed for a false prophet's mouth. When television super shrinks conducted group psychosis, when drugged up teenagers lived in a haze of oblivion. They will say this was a time when we hamster-wheeled between the jagged jaws of death, hovering above us, licking murderously. When blues and jazz meant nothing to the asterisk of adolescent faces caught and lost in the footnote of pop cult hysteria, they will say. They will say this was a time of the falling towers, when halos of mellow rain screams on our cities. When smoke blackened the sky until the sun was a jaundiced memory. They will say this was a time when English spoken with the wrong accent meant an uncertain fate, and both red and blue states forgot that God was colorblind. They will say this was a time morality drank of Hollywood's Hemlock. When intellectual cowards bowed to the power and the promise of gold, they will say that a horrible darkness whispered our names until we closed our eyes and trembled with fear until we became what we feared, until we became that darkness, they will say. They will say this was a time of war in the name of terror, in the name of freedom, for the sake of peace, so there would be no more war in the name of war. They will say this was a time of shrunken bellies and refugees and blood being plagued by the ache of disease and of islands floating away on rafts of human bodies. They will say this was the time of the bullet bite, the misogynist lyric and the anti-truth, when we all danced to the beat of our children's cracking skulls. But let them also say this was a time we fought against a self-inflicted genocide. This was when something human stood up to resist Orwellian jackboots, that finally in the rumbling throat of Ray Charles, we heard what America could become, that in the bite of Mark Twain's wit, we finally got the punchline, finally realized that manifest destiny could no longer patch the human-sized hole in our history. Let them say this was a time we said yes, was a time we said yes again, and again, and again, and again, and again, to the pages of Neruda's verses resounding with peace for the coming twilight, peace for the bridge, peace for the wine, peace for the letters that seek us and rise in our blood, peace for the old songs entwining us all with land and love's peace, for the city in the morning when the bread rises, peace for the ashes of the fallen, peace for all things living, peace for every water, peace for every land. Let them say that this was when the woman stepped forward. This was when the woman stepped forward declaring, I am that I am, and men broke ourselves of the need to break women. Let them say this was the time we struggled against fist and fallacy, and of lawyers abandoning law and courtroom and planting wheat in a Kenyan field. Let them say this was a time that truth found our word again, and we were unafraid to open our mouths to it. Let them say this was a time when we were a people of faith, and a time when faith was in crisis, that we were a people of hope when it made no damn sense to hope at all, that we still believed that love could be as simple as the cliched images our ancestors painted on the sides of caves, images birthing the first human song, like water, like flower, like sun, moon, and star, like wind, and rain, and river, and fire, because even as earth shook beneath our shoes, we needed to know there were things that would never change. Let them say it was a time that we desperately reached through the malignant maelstrom of electronic chaos, that we reached through the maddened invocations of the soulless who profit from the poisonous pathology of our time, and we found others there, others with our own eyes and hands, reaching back. Thank you.