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Freedom Action of the Week
Email List Archive
Free-Market.Net's F r e e d o m A c t i o n o f t h e W e e k
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Edited by Thomas L. Knapp. To subscribe or unsubscribe to this and
other lists, click to: http://www.free-market.net/features/lists/
----- Featured Action of the Week -----
Fourth Week of May, 2001:
Never Forget
I don't like the idea of martyrdom. It offends me that someone must die in
order to lend weight to a good cause. Every lost life is a big basket of
lost opportunities, experiences and friendships.
Unfortunately, we have our martyrs, and Memorial Day is an appropriate time
to remember them, a time to dedicate ourselves to the cause of a future of
life rather than death.
I am thinking, of course, of Peter McWilliams. His death is still an open
wound on the souls of many. I wept when I heard of it, and I wept again
when Diane Fohrnbacher recalled him in a recent speech I was privileged to
hear. Others did too.
McWilliams, if you'll remember, was a best-selling author of many books.
AIDS didn't slow him down. So long as he was able to avail himself of
marijuana to keep his appetite up and his nausea down, Peter continued to
thrive and to bless us.
Thanks to a federal judge's order forbidding him his medicine, Peter choked
to death on his own chemotherapy-induced vomit last June, too weak from
loss of appetite to save himself. I don't think that he wanted to be a
martyr. I think that he wanted to live, to love, and to work. I think that
we were robbed of a beautiful, gifted man. I think that the beauty of the
world is diminished by his absence from it.
And I'm angry.
Nothing we can do will bring Peter McWiliams back. Nothing we can do could
conceivably make his death worthwhile.
But we can remember, and we can work to save others. Next Monday is
Memorial Day, and I propose that we dedicate it to the remembrance of our
martyrs: the victims of the War on Drugs. The dead in their graves, the
prisoners in their cells, and the families with an empty place in heart and
home.
I'm not asking you for a letter to the editor this week, although I'd be
the last one to discourage it. I'm going to ask you for a little bit more.
We've produced a simple flyer, easily reproducible from your desktop
printer and by photocopy, remembering Peter McWilliams and asking others to
do the same.
Use our flyer or create your own, but print out a few copies, and make sure
that they end up in places where they'll be noticed. Place them on your
school or church bulletin board. Wrap flowers in them and place them on
graves when you visit your family plot next Monday. Drop by your local
library, pull the
graphic up on a computer or three, and make it the desktop picture or
screensaver.
Never forget. And don't let anyone else forget, either.
Grab our flyer at:
http://www.free-market.net/images/features/actions/md2001.gif
Learn more about Peter McWilliams at:
http://www.forahero.com/
----- Alternate Actions -----
The Freedom Action of the Week Club: Commit yourself to doing one
action per week. If the action above doesn't appeal to you, consider
one of the alternate actions at:
http://www.free-market.net/features/action/
If you know about another action or organize one of your own, e-mail
Tom at tlknapp@free-market.net so we can tell the rest of the group
next week.
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Thomas L. Knapp | "Your genuine action will explain itself, and will
Managing Editor | explain your other genuine actions. Your con-
Free- Market.Net | formity explains nothing."
| --Ralph Waldo Emerson
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