Ancestors

1074 – “Whether our ancestors came here on the Mayflower, on slave ships, whether they came to Ellis Island or LAX in Los Angeles, whether they came yesterday or walked this land a thousand years ago our great challenge for the 21st century is to find a way to be One America. We can meet all the other challenges if we can go forward as One America.”

-Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States of America

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914 – “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress’d by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion’d from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake.”

-Walt Whitman

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875 – “My father had a favorite: saying: ‘Whoever does not talk to his father never knows what his grandfather said.’ He was trying to express the linear quality or wisdom. His morality was not something that he made up on his own; it had been given to him by his own father and his grandfather before that, a mixture of Hutus and Tutsis stretching back hundreds of years to the time out of memory when our people had migrated to this hilly triangle between lakes.”

–Paul Rusesabagina

Today is Father’s Day, if you have the chance visit or speak to your father today.

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49 – “My Yanomami people have always lived in peace with the forest. Our ancestors taught us to understand our land and animals. We have used this knowledge carefully, for our existence depends on it. My Yanomami land was invaded by miners. A fifth of our people died from diseases we had never known.”

Davi Kopenawa Yanomami [See source notes]

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