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WELCOME! From the incoming President of the National Coalition,
David Byrom, Ph.D.

I welcome you here to this place—reflections of what the Coalition’s members do and have been doing with devoted hearts and minds for over 10 years now.  Please read the welcome message from our founder and past-president, Dr. Karen Shore. I will work with you to at least echo her vision and passion in our struggle for true reform in America. 

Playwright, Tony Kushner, Editorial Board of The Nation, which published on 7/1/02 his commencement speech at Vassar College (May 26, 2002): A  Word to Graduates: Organize!   Since I am so moved by his address, I share some excerpts with you:

“Why me ?’ ... ‘What am I doing here?’ - one of the answers to the what question ought to be: I am here to organize. I am here to be political. I am here to be a citizen in a pluralist democracy. I am here to be effective, to have agency, to make a claim on power, to spread it around, to rearrange it, to democratize it, to legislate it into justice. Why you? Because the world will end if you don't act. You are the citizen of a flawed but actual democracy. Citizens are not actually capable of not acting. It is not given to a citizen that she doesn't act; this is the price you pay for being a citizen of a democracy. Your life is married to the political beyond the possibility of divorcement.

“You are always an agent. When you don't act, you act. When you don't vote, you vote. ...what happens when you despair, you open the door to evil, and evil is always happy to enter, sit down -evil settles in, and it's the devil of a time getting him to vacate…. (Kushner urges looking here in our nation, and in many, many countries around the world.)  See what despair and inaction on the part of citizens produces.  Act! Organize. It's boring but do it. The world ends if you don't.

“Will the world end if you act? Will the world end anyway, even if you find an organization, stuff envelopes, give money, organize? Maybe. Quite possibly. These are monstrous times and there's no telling. …. Look across the globe--when have you ever seen such a dismaying crew in occupation of every seat of power, …. And ever one of them has the means of doing the most appalling damage…. Everyone who wants to can do quite a lot toward bringing the world to an end.

 “But hope isn't a choice, it's a moral obligation, a human obligation, an obligation to the cells in your body. Hope is a function of those cells, it's a bodily function the same as breathing and eating and sleeping. Hope is not naïve, hope grapples endlessly with despair. Real, vivid, powerful, thunderclap hope, like the soul, is at home in darkness, is divided; but lose your hope and you lose your soul, and you don't want to do that, trust me, even if you haven't got a soul, and who knows, you shouldn't be careless about it. Will the world end if you act? Who can say? Will you lose your soul, your democratic-citizen soul, if you don't act, if you don't organize? I guarantee it. ...

“The great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz has a poem titled "On Angels" … it concludes by articulating the best possible answer to WHAT AM I DOING HERE and WHY ME.   The poet is haunted by a voice:

‘I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draws near
another one
do what you can.’

“….Emerson's commencement address to the Harvard Divinity School begins so beautifully,

‘In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm of Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never more happily displayed....

But speak the truth , and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.... Good is positive. Evil is merely privative.... It is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real.... The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul.... The dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures. [But speak the truth] and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.’

(Kushner concludes to the graduates:) “ I am certain you are aflame. Hurry hurry hurry, now now now, damn the critics and the bad reviews: The world is waiting for you! Organize. Speak the truth.”

Organize with us - join us to speak the truth -  donate to us the support of your hearts and minds, your ACTIONS, and your money.  Please remember - as Tony Kushner said so well: we are always agents. When we don’t act, we act. When we don’t vote, we vote.  And … Hurry, the Time Is Now.

I eagerly continue our working together, 
David Byrom, Ph.D., President, National Coalition of Mental Health Professionals and Consumers, Inc.

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