JOSE VEGA: My friends, it’s good to be able to address you for the second time today. My name is Jose Vega and I am running for U.S. House of Representatives, otherwise known as the U.S. Congress. The District I’m running in is the 15th Congressional District. It is also known as the poorest Congressional District in the entire country, in New York City, which I’m sure a lot of you heard about, where Wall Street is located, the center of commerce in the world. It’s also the place in the entire United States where you have the highest rate of child poverty, highest concentration of people living below the poverty line. And it’s also home to one of the most unknown, yet very important, founding father, Gouverneur Morris. Morris actually wrote the physical document which we call the Constitution, which is probably why the oligarchs make sure no one knows who he is.
So here I am in Paris. Sort of like Morris, actually; he was an ambassador to France in 1792. And he came here to try and also bring out the best of the French intellectual culture at the time and try to save France from committing the sin of the failure of its own Revolution.
I’m not here to save France from any particular sin. I’m here instead to bring something to you all from where I come from and who I’ve been involved with.
I’d like to talk to you all about Fr. Harry Bury. For 70 years he’s been a Catholic priest. He is now 95 years old. He is called “the maverick priest.” I’m sure he would have come to this conference if he could have been here. In 1971, at the request of some Vietnamese, he and three other Americans chained themselves to the U.S. Embassy gate in Saigon to protest the Vietnam War. That took real courage, way more than when I and other people do interventions. So, 43 years later, in 2014, Fr. Bury was awarded the key to Ho Chi Minh City for his efforts to end the Vietnam war. Two months ago, Fr. Bury made a trip to the United Nations to speak out against genocide. After, he made a trip to the Bronx to visit the sisters of Mother Theresa. Mother Theresa started that center in the Bronx, because she said that it was essentially the same as Calcutta. And I agree. I call the Bronx “Gaza West.” And the Oasis Plan that Lyndon LaRouche proposed is the same approach that has to be taken everywhere, including in the Bronx. When we visited the sisters, we had interviewed Fr. Bury in the Garden of the sisters’ convent in the Bronx. That interview was conducted by Kynan [Thistlethwaite]. I heard him recount these experiences in his life and his dedication to his mission. It was evident there that his commitment to true freedom and love for everyone was just as strong at 95, as it was when he first started being a priest.
Father Bury is a living example of the coincidence of opposites. What do I mean? Well, let me present to you a paradox. This is a quote by Dr. King: “You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer…. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.
“Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.”
Well, here’s a man who’s 95 years old, but his soul is just as alive as when he was a young man committing himself to the cloth.
Fr. Bury also put a challenge to an audience gathered at the United Nations about the idea that there are no evil people. He said that he was trying to challenge his assumptions, and wanted to have everyone challenge their own assumptions. That’s his dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche about her Ten Principles. That’s what our dialogue with ourselves should be. And then there was Bury’s challenging response to the speech of the Pope, saying that Nicholas of Cusa and Lyndon LaRouche, in this Oasis Plan, are identical. He said Nicholas of Cusa should become a saint, like Mother Theresa, and that the ideas of LaRouche should be taken out of captivity, just like those of Cusa. Keep in mind—This is a man that stood between Palestinian and Israelis in Gaza, and was briefly held by Hamas as part of a negotiation. He puts his life on the line, like the people that founded the United States. And a person that lives that way is forever young.
