Statement of Albert C. Eisenberg on receiving the James B. Hunter award.
Al is the 2001 winner of the Arlington Human Rights Commission James B. Hunter Award for Human Rights
Thank you so very much for this great honor.
A politician is defined as someone who talks while others sleep. But I promise to speak no longer than it takes to make you drowsy.
H.L. Mencken, no humanitarian by any stretch of the imagination at least had the wit to remark that the world would be a better place if everybody would leave everybody else the hell alone.
Lincoln stretched the concept of human rights by noting that we each should be able to feel the lash on the other man's back.
These expressions still have meaning in today's world where slavery still flourishes, where feuds stretching back centuries continue to split communities, where prejudice often rules people's passions. Yet we are all the same. We bleed when pricked. We cry when hurt.
As a young Jewish boy, I grew up on the fringes of discrimination in segregated Tidewater, VA, I vividly remember the scenes of that time. I remember the Lee Theatre in Hampton, Virginia, and the narrow stairs up to the balcony where black Americans had to sit, watching movies with only white characters. I remember reading in the newspaper about the lynchings taking place in the deep South. I remember the segregated bathrooms and water fountains and lunch counters and schools, and the busing. I watched the black faces in the windows as they rode their bus to school. We passed one another daily yet we never came in contact.
And as I look back on that time, in the palpable presence of segregation, I remember feeling the difference, the distance, the wall between my world and theirs. And frankly I did not feel that lash on the other man's back, but I was disquieted and disturbed, and I grew, and became more aware and I felt the segregation, and felt how it soiled things, and I began to hate the intolerance that ran both openly and beneath the society in which I lived my childhood. And again, as I look back over my own journey, I know that all of us, not just blacks, were so grievously injured by the barriers that this land of liberty erected. Today, these barriers are coming down. But they are not all down. For some, they are barely beginning to lean, as we still confront the hatred and fear based on people's sexual orientation, or the way they talk and dress, or the cruel assumptions about the limits of people with disabilities. The old prejudices were carefully taught, and hard to unlearn.
We have lost so much by the segregations that separate us, whether physically or in the mind, and yet we learn and we change, and we have enacted laws that alter behavior and ultimately attitude.
Here in Arlington we look and feel like the world-but we don't act like it. As different as we are, the hate that boils over because of skin color and religion, the grudges about some battle that took place a thousand years ago, flat heels and round heels, butter side up, butter side down-the stupid things that segregate us from each other, none of them now stand in the way of Arlington's celebration of diversity, a diversity that works and that makes us strong and to which we here have committed ourselves. Thank G-d here in Arlington, we steadily emerged from what Hubert Humphrey called the shadows of discrimination and we have walked more uprightly into the bright sunlight of humanity. Such short steps we needed to take, yet such a long journey it has been.
A man of this community who helped lead Arlington on that journey and who made sure that the path was straight and that the obstacles overcome was my friend, my colleague, and my example of a life led in the sunlight. Jim Hunter, the ex-Marine, with a heart as gentle as an angel's, and principles as hard as granite, epitomized for all of us how we can all rise above our prejudices, and take people for what they are, made in G-d's image, and endowed by the creator with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By Jim's life, his work, and his example, he set a standard for us here where our differences do not segregate but bring us closer together. I accept this honor in Jim's memory, so that he may continue to live in the hearts of Arlington's people to inspire us all to a community, which in the eyes of his spirit, we would all be proud to know as our home.