He is the best young organizer-activist I have seen: Will Bunch: Dying from ALS, Ady Barkan will save U.S. democracy if it's the last thing he does: "A onetime running and outdoor enthusiast who now uses a motorized wheelchair to zip around, Ady Barkan says it’s been getting harder just within the last few weeks for him to lift his fork and eat his meals...
...His words are slurred and no longer come as quickly.... But two years after doctors told the now-34-year-old Barkan that he’s terminally ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—better known as ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease—he can still raise his right fist.... “Stand up and help make my voice louder, because ALS is taking that away from me!” Barkan exhorted a packed reception room in Philadelphia City Hall where a couple of hundred people had wedged in and others were turned away from hearing his labored yet forceful words.... When Donald Trump was elected president on Nov. 8, 2016 — roughly a month after Barkan was diagnosed with ALS—there were a lot of folks on the left side of America’s political dial who vowed to resist the incoming president’s blend of authoritarianism and bigotry as if it’s the last thing they do. But few meant it the way Ady Barkan did. “The explicit reason I’m doing all of this is because our democracy is under incredible threat and we don’t have much time to save it—so I’m doing whatever I can to save and strengthen our democracy,” Barkan told me after the event, gazing with curiosity outside Gym’s fifth-floor City Hall office at the iconic Jacques Lipchitz sculpture called Government of the People. “The personal reason that I’m doing it is because it makes me feel hopeful and empowered and connected to people around me,” he quickly added....
“We’re on the verge of a political revolution,” Barkan said with clear enthusiasm. “Think about how dark our political life is—and then think that 27 months from now we can have the most progressive president in 80 years! We could have a progressive Congress!” Barkan hopes he lives long enough to see it.
#shouldread
