popsandculture reblogged
brooklynmutt-deactivated2021090
For a country so proud it's "free" America is pretty good at telling people what they can & can't do with their bodies & relationships.
I think I'm officially a fan girl. You have won, Kelly Oxford.
But, if my parents saw me gettin' too big for my britches, if they saw me lookin' proud, my father would be right there. He would say to me, "Boy, don't you dare walk around this house like you hit a triple, when you were born on third base!" He would say to me, "You need to understand something, you drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty and opportunity that you did not dig. You eat lavishly from banquet tables prepared for you by your ancestors. You sit under the shade of trees that you did not plant or cultivate or care for. You have a choice in life, you can just sit back, getting fat, dumb, and happy, consuming all the blessings put before you, or it can metabolize inside of you, become fuel to get you into the fight, to make this democracy real, to make it true to its words that we can be a nation of liberty and justice for all."
Excerpt from Cory Booker's 2012 Stanford commencement speech