Fall 2006 Alpha of Florida Initiation Address

“Freedom’s Just Another Word….”

“Great Wits Whet and Cultivate One Another”

“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose”

From the Gettysburg Address:  Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…. We are met on a great battle field…. We come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow, this ground – The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

From John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address:  Let the word go forth from this time and place…to friend and foe alike…that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans...born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage…and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed….

From Martin Luther King:  In a sense, we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on the promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check – a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

From William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech:  . . .  the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.  He writes not of the heart but of the glands.