PLATFORM : Goddess for America
Wednesday will be the second anniversary of the Tian An Men Square massacre. The Chinese student-worker movement marched, fasted, negotiated, taunted and defied the masters of an army of 3 million soldiers. From memory, they fashioned a likeness of the Statue of Liberty to symbolize their dream of freedom.
As Los Angeles casts about for an appropriate symbol of the multicultural city it has become, it should look no further than the statue the Chinese students made and which was crushed beneath the tanks at Tian An Men Square. A replica of the Goddess of Democracy, facing the Pacific in Los Angeles Harbor, would be a powerful reaffirmation of our immigrant tradition, an acknowledgment that immigrants come to our shores from lands across both oceans, and an assertion of the U.S. role as a Pacific nation.
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