The meaning of the massive marches which will take place in Washington, D.C. and around the country during the inauguration of George W. Bush goes beyond any single event. These marches speak to what we want and struggle for in this country, what our forefathers and foremothers struggled to bring into being, what our children and their children must have to live free, full and meaningful lives. We assemble together and march on January 20 in Washington, D.C. and all over the country, then, for these basic reasons:

1. To register rejection of calls to forget this act against the people, this perversion of the electoral process, this willful distortion of democracy. We say "no" to reconciliation without rightness, peace without justice and power without respect for the people and their right to share it;
    
2. To reaffirm the illegitimacy of the Bush presidency, which is not grounded in the majority voice of the people, nor on a full and fair count, especially in Florida. Instead, he was appointed by five right-wing Supreme Court justices who undermined both their own claims of impartiality and the electoral process by stopping the recount of the disputed votes so Bush could pretend a victory;
    
3. To register opposition to the disenfranchisement of African peoples, Latinos and others through providing outdated voting machines, hostile and unresponsive election officials, unwarranted and threatening police presence near and around polling areas, voter suppression by Florida's officials and the halting of the recount by the Supreme Court;
    
4. To call added attention to the flawed and unfinished character of this democracy which the rulers and their allies assume is a white finished product rather than an unfinished ongoing multicultural project to create a just and good society;
    
5. To demonstrate resistance to right-wing attempts to dispirit the masses of people, especially people of color and young people in general, to alienate them from the electoral process and clear the field for the imposition of their retrogressive agenda;
    
6. To reaffirm our commitment to the ongoing project of creating a just and good society, a society in which all persons and peoples can live their lives in dignity and decency in a context of maximum human freedom and human flourishing; and
    
7. To reaffirm the need and urgency of building a national and international progressive movement to achieve the just society and the good world we all want and deserve to live in.

Let's stand up and step forward, then, for ourselves, for history and for the future which must be forged, like our past, in the crucible of continuing and uncompromising struggle.