About Us
Our community in Palm Desert is an active force for change in the desert.
Often we write letters to our local representatives. Our voter turn out of over 98% of our precinct on Election Day makes PDG Democrats a voice to be heard.
We have approximately 100 dues paying members, and over 600 democrats are registered to vote in our precinct. We turn out and vote for the candidate of our choice.
Our membership is mainly retired since this is an over 55 community. We actively volunteer to register voters at the local mall, and we gladly donate our time to many candidates and causes. If you have an issue or are a candidate in the Palm Desert area, we would like to hear from you.
For further information, please contact Charlie Ara, President cell 310-283-8737
Sonja Martin, 1st vice president, 760-8371525, email sonja@icehouse.net
Henry Hoyle, 2nd vice-president 760-346-9793
Sharon Miller, Secretary/Treasurer 760-898-6454 email bmcclane@redshift.com
In Honor of MLK day
RFK's Mindless Menace of Violence, Still
by Abby Zimet
Common Dreams: January 14, 2011
Given Arizona, and Obama's speech, and the upcoming MLK Day, it's
instructive to revisit the remarkable but little-noted speech Robert
Kennedy made in Cleveland the day after King's murder in 1968, just
months before he himself was killed. Deriding violence as "the voice of
madness, not the voice of reason," Kennedy stressed that the victims of
violence "are human beings whom other human beings loved and needed."
The whole speech:
"This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I
have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak
briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which
again stains our land and every one of our lives.
It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are
black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They
are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved
and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be
certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it
goes on and on and on in this country of ours.
Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No
martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.
No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper
is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is
only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.
Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily
- whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the
law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of
violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of
the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself
and his children, the whole nation is degraded.
"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful
appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are
sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."
Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our
common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept
newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify
killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We
make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons
and ammunition they desire.
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often
we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the
shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence
abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of
inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.
Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is
clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only
a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.
For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly
destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence
of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the
violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men
because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of
a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in
the winter.
This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to
stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us
all.
I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there
a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be
done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach
that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the
policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you
threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to
confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not
with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.
We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom
we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common
dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common
fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common
impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no
final answers.
Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our
fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to
enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our
own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the
terrible truths of our existence.
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn
to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others.
We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be
built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short
life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.
Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great
to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot
vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live
with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment
of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out
their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and
fulfillment they can.
Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin
to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those
around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder
to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers
and countrymen once again."