Michele Bachmann Gets a, MIC CHECK!
11 November 11
ichele Bachmann was forced off the stage at a speech in South Carolina Thursday after a group of Occupy Charleston protesters swarmed the event and began shouting down the congresswoman.
The protest occurred as Bachmann was delivering a foreign policy speech aboard the USS Yorktown in Charleston.
"This will only take a minute," the two dozen protesters shouted, using the "human microphone" technique that has become a symbol of the Occupy Wall Street protests. "You capitalize on dividing Americans ... claiming people that disagree with you… are unpatriotic socialists ... and you promote discrimination."
As the protesters shouted, Bachmann stood frozen on stage, unsure of what to do. Soon, police escorted her from the stage, as her own supporters began to shout down the protesters with chants of "USA! USA!"
The protesters left on the scene of their own accord, and Bachmann returned to the stage a few minutes later.
"Don't you love the First Amendment?" she said, per NBC's First Read.
Dear Friends,
I don't often get on my historian's soapbox, but 11.11 often seems so misunderstood...
Armistice Day.
On the eleventh day of the eleventh month, at the 11th hour—after four years of combat, 15 million deaths, and some of the most racist propaganda the world had ever seen—the guns fell silent. Why? Maybe because someone finally heard the Women's International Peace Congress. Maybe because someone finally understood that the best way to stop filling psychiatric wards was to stop traumatizing people. Maybe because soldiers, sailors and armaments workers finally realized they were not powerless--and went on strike. Mostly, I think, b/c the so-called "Great Powers" had beaten each other down long enough to risk trying something new: a ceasefire. They didn't know if peace would work, only that continued fighting would not.
Was the subsequent peace perfect? Far from it. Did it last? No. But even the faultiest peace can't happen until the antagonists stop fighting. Because I remember this day as Armistice Day, it's not a patriotic occasion, but a spiritual one. Whatever peace I seek, it cannot come until I declare a ceasefire, until I'm brave enough--or exhausted enough--to "lay down my sword and shield." Not because I know what the peace will look like, or how long it will last, or who will pay for it, but simply because I'm finally ready to risk something other than continued fighting.
(SRN: AMEN)
