Kendra's Bat Mitzvah

Kendra, you and your sister are the light of my life.

Kendra, I'm proud of your accomplishments: being born and staying alive, doing well in school, being generous and kind to your friends, and performing at a high level on the soccer field. Yet I'm most proud of you when we marched together in the anti-war protests of 2003 in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and in 2004 to commemorate the failure and loss of life in Iraq.

When I was your age Kendra we had a family friend, Ms. Hutch, and we would regularly go to her home to have dinner and socialize with her and her brother. I'll never forget the evening we went to her home and she was very excited to tell us that the Smithsonian Institute had come to her home to ask her if she had the Suffragette sash that she wore, as a girl your age, when she marched in Washington, D.C. to advocate for a women's right to vote. They wanted the sash so they could display it in the Smithsonian to remind everyone of the noble and tireless effort women made in the Suffragette Movement. It's hard to imagine now but just 85 years ago women were not allowed to vote. Women campaigned for decades before finally winning the right to vote with the passage of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. Your grandmother, who today is an elected legislator in the Delaware General Assembly, was born in 1918 before women had won the right to vote.

Today the world is facing another scourge and that's the application of war as a process for achieving a law abiding and peaceful world. Dr. Martin Luther King said "The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows." I know there's no hope of ending war in my lifetime. Like Moses I won't make it to the Promised Land. However I hope and pray that in your lifetime wars will be rendered obsolete as tools of international interaction. And some day I hope the Smithsonian Institute knocks on your door and asks you if you have some memorabilia from those days when you marched protesting war. When that day comes we'll know that the plague of war that has ravaged this planet since the inception of civilization has finally been vanquished and men have learned to use their brains instead of their brawn to solve the problems of living together in our very fragile and finite planet.