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damnedifIknow

(3,183 posts) Wed Feb 12, 2014, 12:36 AM Feb 2014

Chris Hedges interviews Lynne Stewart (Part 1)

Last edited Wed Feb 12, 2014, 01:09 AM - Edit history (1)

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The lynching and disbarring of civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart, who because she has terminal cancer was recently released from prison after serving four years of a 10-year sentence, is a window into the collapse of the American legal system. Stewart—who has stood up to state power for more than three decades in order to give a voice to those whom authorities seek to crush, who has spent her life defending the poor and the marginalized, who wept in court when one of her clients was barred from presenting a credible defense—is everything a lawyer should be in an open society. But we no longer live in an open society. The persecution of Stewart is the persecution of us all.

*She stressed the importance of community.

“The most important thing is don’t let yourself get isolated,” she said. “Don’t feel that you’re the only one in the room that thinks this way and you must be crazy or something, and they’re going to get you because you’re the only one. Find the other people who think like you. They’re out there. There are people out there. There are groups. There’s everyone from the raging grannies right up to the very serious lefties, but there’s somebody out there, make sure you’re not all alone. That’s the worst part of what we face these days. As long as you’re with other people you have a fighting chance, and you can organize more people.”

“This is a pretty loveless world we live in,” she concluded. “We have lots of romantic love. We have lots of ‘Sex and the City.’ But real love, love that is the kind that saves people, and makes the world better, and makes you go to bed with a smile on your face, that love is lacking greatly. You have to search for that.”

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/02/10-1