I took great pride standing beside an imaginary podium reciting a famous speech I learned at Westlake Jr. High School when I stole a look at my good friend's homework assignment which he was required to study and memorize and although I did not have the same class as my friend David Wong I was interested in learning his assignment and took great delight in learning and even competing for this prize this assignment even though it was on my own time no credit whatsoever. The assignment was knowing about the famous Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln as this famous past President of The United States of America is to this day a legend and a very important past President of my country and yours. Some forty years have since eclipsed my imagination and/or memory and here I am standing beside this podium so to speak but in blog form just another way in a written form. But as I imagine being at a free speech rally when I was a young student I transgress or fast forward to today reading the Gettysburg Address as if I were still there at Sproul Hall on the campus of UC Berkeley where my memory still serves me well in long term capacity it is too bad now I can never find my car keys. Quite literally I did read his famous Gettysburg address out loud in private no masses of large crowds or radio listeners to hear me speak this time today. I was literally in tears to be so privileged to speak the very same speech made by Lincoln in the same era my great grandfather lived when he ventured to America where he lived a good life and desired to stay or for his remains to be in America as written in a book entitled "Bury My Bones" by my cousin Lani Farkas Ah-Tye. Another man I admired for his speech who did stand at Sproul Hall and make known his ability to lead the free speech movement was Mario Salvio. The part I remembered best was the part I imagined today as if I were back in school in 1971 at UC Berkeley at Sproul Hall reiterating my favorite part of his speech saying with great emotion that there is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, but you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you got to put
your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels …upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
At one time not too long ago I met Eldridge Clever a member of the former Black Panther Party on a radio station and spoke to him as a caller. He had written the famous book Soul On Ice if I remembered correctly and so I knew about him as one of the more militant leaders of Oakland the tough town where I lived and worked and studied in school. But the more powerful influential leader to me was Martin Luther King and I was introduced to his works in civil rights by the very enthused and long time history teacher even to this day Mr. Leroy Votto much to my regret I never met him or spoke to Martin Luther King. But I studied my history teacher's words very carefully.
Getting back to Mario Salvio he was once remembered for reaching for his listeners his followers and getting them into protective and orderly fashion away from the weapons of authority in as much as this famed speech maker was an activist. I'm just an old man of sixty five sometimes looking much younger. Martial arts is a fine art of exercise and for movie making but as I tell my son it takes more skill to get out of a fight than it does to get into one.
