Marianne Williamson — excerpt from congressional campaign announcement:
20 October 2013
…At my Sister Giant Conference in Los Angeles last year, I urged almost two thousand women to consider running for office using the principles of non-violence to birth a new American politics. After experiencing the energy and enthusiasm of the conference, I spent long months pondering how I could best further such a movement. The response that feels most real and true to me is to run for office myself.
I do not think of this move as a career change. Rather, I feel I’m further expanding my work by taking the transformational principles to which I have dedicated myself for the last thirty years into another area where they are sorely needed. While a new paradigm, holistic, relational perspective now saturates many areas of our society — from education to business to medicine to spirituality — our politics seem to be outside its reach. And we cannot afford to turn away from politics. We might not touch it, but it certainly touches us. And the increasingly calcified thought forms that dominate U.S. politics today — based more on the past than the present, more on fear than on love, and more on economic than humanitarian values — threaten to sabotage our collective good and undermine our democracy.
Those who have sought inner wisdom and spiritual understanding are the last people who should be sitting out the political process, for those who see into the cause of a problem know better than to simply address its symptoms. And those who have a clue as to what changes one heart have a clue as to what will change the world. Humanitarian values are democratic values, and those who are most committed to them must find our political voice.
We cannot allow our government to continue drifting in a blind and heartless direction, and expect to bequeath to our children the blessings of liberty that were bequeathed to us. There is need for a politics of conscience, a new era of public discourse in which love is not minimized, the voices of women and children are not marginalized, and the future is not bartered for a pot of unrighteous gold.
…I ask for your support, that this campaign might be more than simply an effort to send one woman to Congress. May it be a vessel for revitalized citizenship for those who participate, and a new possibility for love in action.
…God bless you, God bless America, and God bless the world.
