If somebody tells you that there are no heroes anymore, tell him to get away from you, you don't like being approached by strangers and, besides, he's wrong:
American Heroes:
Amardeep Kaleka
Son of slain Sikh temple leader to challenge Paul Ryan in 2014, by Traci G. Lee:
Amardeep Kaleka knows he’s the underdog.
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His father, Satwant Singh Kaleka, was one of the founders of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin. He was killed last August when a man opened fire inside the temple. Kaleka’s father is credited with trying to take down the gunman and saving many lives before losing his own.
“My father lived the American dream,” Kaleka said.
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The focus of his campaign will be economic reform, which he says Republican leaders in Washington have backwards these days. “While [Republicans] believe in trickle-down economics, [Democrats] abide by the idea of getting normal people good paying jobs and allowing the middle class, not corporations, to drive the economy.”
Wendy Davis
Who is Wendy Davis? By Lydia DePillis:
You know, the Fort Worth Democrat who stood for eleven hours to filibuster a bill in the Texas State Senate that would place new restrictions on abortion clinics and ban the practice after 20 weeks of pregnancy?
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She knows about single motherhood, and poverty. The 50-year-old Davis had to care for her three siblings at the age of 14 for her single mother, and became a single mother herself at the age of 19.
She knows the law. Davis became the first person in her family to graduate from college, with a degree from Texas Christian University and then Harvard Law School. She clerked, litigated, and spent a few years in the title insurance business before starting her own practice for federal and local government affairs, real estate, and contract compliance.
Stand and Deliver: After Her 12-Hour Filibuster, How Far Will Texas Senator Wendy Davis Run? by Heidi Mitchell:
"He was a good dad,” she continues. “But things were hard for my mom. So we all started working very young.” At fourteen, Davis took a job selling newspapers door-to-door... By the end of her junior year of high school, she spent half the day answering phones in a pediatrician’s office, the other half in class, and evenings waiting tables... The summer before senior year, “I decided I knew everything in the world, and I moved in with my boyfriend,” she says with a sigh.
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The marriage lasted less than two years, and by nineteen, Wendy was a divorced single mother working two jobs... “Looking back, I don’t know if I could do it again. But somehow you just have the energy to do what you have to do,” she says. “And the great thing was, after a year, I realized that college wasn’t only for other people.”
Sister Simone Campbell
The Roosevelt Institute Recognizes Sister Simone Campbell With Four Freedoms AwardThe 2013 Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Awards were presented on October 16...
The medals are awarded to those who exemplify FDR’s vision of democracy as outlined in his famous January 6, 1941 address.
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FREEDOM OF WORSHIP: SISTER SIMONE CAMPBELL
Sister Simone Campbell has served as the Executive Director of NETWORK, a national Catholic social justice lobby, since 2004. She is a religious leader, attorney, and poet. She wrote the “nuns letter” supporting health care reform and got 59 leaders of Catholic Sisters to sign. She is perhaps best known for the Nuns on the Bus tour of nine states she organized in 2012 to oppose the Ryan Budget, which received an avalanche of national media attention.
Sister Simone brought the house down at the Democratic National Convention last summer in Charlotte with passages like this:
But their budget goes astray in not acknowledging that we are responsible not only for ourselves and our immediate families. Rather, our faith strongly affirms that we are all responsible for one another.
I am my sister’s keeper. I am my brother’s keeper.
And:
Looking out at you tonight, I feel your presence combined with that of the thousands of caring people we met on our journey. Together, we understand that an immoral budget that hurts already struggling families does not reflect our nation's values. We are better than that.
Don't count on her stopping any time soon. Recently she pushed Pope Francis on the issue of women in the church.
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So, if you're holding out for a hero, stop, they are all around.
