Sunday, October 4 | 11:30am – 1pm
Presented in partnership with Oregon Humanities and community organizer Wendy Willis, this conversation will explore what it means to “mutually pledge” ourselves to one another today.
While the opening of the Declaration of Independence gets the fanfare and the fireworks—“When in the course of human events” and all that—the closing clause contains a quiet promise: “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” When we talk about the founding, we often think of it as a severing from a distant power and a proclamation of individual rights. And yet, buried in that big individualistic origin story, there is a pledge of support, solidarity, and mutual aid. Today, as we witness political violence, hostility, and polarization, this conversation invites us to explore what it means for us to be bound to one another and to ask ourselves: is there any idea, any value, any dream for the future that we care about enough to tie ourselves to one another to protect or pursue it?
This program is presented as part of One Nation and How We Show Up: Oregon Jews in Civil Society, An America 250 Exhibition.
Wendy Willis is the founding director of Oregon’s Kitchen Table, a statewide community engagement program housed at Portland State University. She is also a poet, an essayist, a stitcher, and a self-proclaimed democracy geek. Wendy was raised in Springfield, but now lives with her family in Portland.