[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15348-15350]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




        HONORING HELEN SMITH, POW ADVOCATE, ON HER 91ST BIRTHDAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Higgins of Louisiana). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the 
gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Garrett) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GARRETT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert), my colleague.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia for 
yielding.
  Mr. Speaker, it is indeed an honor to speak on behalf of a person I 
have come to know and love. In fact, the First District of Texas has 
been blessed to be the home of many remarkable individuals who have 
gone above and beyond to serve others in Texas and throughout the 
world.
  It is indeed a privilege to honor a woman from Longview, Texas, who 
has dedicated her life to serving and providing comfort for our 
Nation's veterans, particularly our prisoners of war. Her name is Helen 
Smith, and October 5 of this year marks her 91st birthday.
  Helen's caring for our Nation's POWs began with her husband, Gordon 
Smith, a survivor of the Bataan Death March in 1942 and a POW until the 
end of World War II.
  Throughout her long and happy marriage to Gordon, Helen gained a 
personal understanding of the struggles many of our veterans and former 
POWs endure; but armed with the knowledge of what our veterans and 
former POWs face on a daily basis, Helen set out into the world to help 
as many of our veterans as she possibly could. She spent countless 
hours in VA facilities ensuring veterans, young and old, got the care 
they so desperately needed and deserved.
  Helen has walked the Halls of Congress advocating for our veterans 
and former POWs throughout her life. She is a driving force and was 
behind Public Law 97-37, which improved VA benefit programs for former 
POWs.
  Helen is not slowing down even at her age. At 90, Helen would head 
over to the Longview Community Based Outpatient Clinic every morning at 
sunrise. She would make a pot of coffee and spend her day talking to 
veterans, giving them a sympathetic ear and helping them through the VA 
process.
  It is a distinct privilege to recognize such a remarkable woman, to 
thank her for her tireless service to our veterans and former POWs, and 
to wish her a very happy 91st birthday.
  Her accomplishments are recorded in the Congressional Record, which 
will endure as long as there is a United States of America.
  I do thank my friend from Virginia for yielding.

                              {time}  2115

  Mr. GARRETT. Much has been said recently about the First Amendment to 
the Constitution of the United States, and specifically how in this 
land of the free we have the prerogative to do as we choose in matters 
that manifest themselves, as communication that we can speak freely 
even when that speech is objectionable to some.
  And many people who have been fortunate enough to be amongst the 1 in 
1,300 high school football seniors to take the field on a Sunday at an 
NFL stadium have availed themselves of this right that was given to 
them by people greater than themselves, perhaps who shed their very 
lifeblood that they might make a decision not to stand for the anthem 
that embodies the gratitude for that sacrifice.
  Brian Tracy once said: ``Develop an attitude of gratitude and give 
thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step 
forward is a step towards achieving something bigger and better. . . 
.''
  More recently, an individual said: ``If you were successful somebody 
along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere 
in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American 
system that we have that allowed you to thrive.''
  Later in that speech, President Obama said, ``So if you have a 
business, you didn't build that,'' someone did it for you. And he was 
roundly excoriated, but at some level he acknowledged the sacrifice of 
so many that compels me to stand here today to ask that when the 
national anthem of the United States of America is played, that you 
demonstrate some semblance of gratitude for the sacrifice that has been 
given by untold millions before you that allows you the prerogative not 
to stand.
  And so should you choose not to stand, I support that right. I 
believe that right is fundamental to what makes us Americans, but I 
implore you to learn the history of our Nation that allows you the 
right not to stand, for, to be certain, there are places in the world, 
North Korea, where choosing not to stand when the anthem is played 
might lead to a horrible demise.

[[Page 15349]]

  Gilbert Chesterton once said: ``One sees great things from the 
valley; only small things from the peak.'' And the French political 
philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville said: ``The greatness of America lies 
not in her being more enlightened than any other Nation, but rather in 
her ability to repair her faults.''
  And so when a slaveowner named Jefferson wrote the Declaration of 
Independence, he talked about how all people were created equal, 
despite his inherent flaw or flaws, and when the preamble to the 
Constitution was hammered out, the Founders suggested that we should 
strive not to be a perfect union but a more perfect union by 
acknowledging that, in fact, where there are humans in charge, we will 
never achieve perfection.
  Tonight, I ask your indulgence, if you tuned in at home completely by 
accident, for a moment to learn about how lucky we are, regardless of 
the circumstance of our birth, compared to our peers across the globe, 
to have the opportunity to live in this, the greatest Nation in the 
history of mankind, and how standing for an anthem that honors an 
imperfect nation that continually strives for perfection is not only 
the right thing to do, it is the only thing to do if you understand the 
scope of the sacrifice of those who came before us.
  Imperfect people like Thomas Jefferson gave us near perfect 
documents. And so tonight, as my vehicle to discuss why we should stand 
for our anthem, I will choose the district that I am honored to have 
the opportunity to serve, Virginia's Fifth District. I will say, in all 
humility, that while I am ordinary, the district is great; that the 
Fifth District of Virginia is, in my humble opinion, without hyperbole, 
the greatest congressional district in the country. And I will give you 
ten reasons why I hope the next time the anthem is played you will 
stand and think with reverence upon those who made sacrifices that gave 
us the opportunity to live in the greatest land humanity has ever seen.
  In 1743, born in the Fifth District of Virginia was this very man, 
Thomas Jefferson. An imperfect man who had a thirst for knowledge and 
said, ``I cannot live without books,'' and continually sought to 
understand what might be perfected as it related to government amongst 
men, and in the Declaration created a document which was the first 
message that a fledging nation held out to the world to say: This is 
who we are.
  And he said, in that document, that all people were created equal; a 
concept that this Nation did not arrive at in reality by virtue of 
slavery and things like the failure to grant women suffrage for some 
150 years, nearly, later.
  However, a charge to work towards a more perfect union, that was 
contained in the document, the Constitution, overseen by James Madison 
also of the Fifth District of Virginia.
  And so while we were imperfect, we were given the greatest and most 
noble of goals, and that is to strive to be more perfect.
  So the vision of Jefferson outlined in the Declaration and expanded 
upon James Madison in the Constitution, and later articulated in this 
town, Washington, D.C., by Dr. King when he said that we should judge 
individuals based not on the color of their skin but on the content of 
their character, it was borne in the hearts and minds of imperfect 
people from the Fifth District of Virginia who gave us near perfect 
documents.
  In 1819, another of Mr. Jefferson's visions came to fruition with the 
foundation of the University of Virginia, a leading public research 
university and the source of incredible scholarship on things like 
human rights and individual liberty and natural law and the freedoms 
that individuals are bestowed by virtue of the Nation in which we live, 
again, in the Fifth District of Virginia.
  Fast forward to 1865, the end of the bloodiest era in our Nation's 
history internally, a conflict as we moved towards a more perfect 
union, in which if you count disease and dysentery and starvation, 
along with combat deaths, over a million Americans gave their lives as 
we worked to become a more perfect union. And we know but a small 
fraction of a percentage of those people's names.
  And we know that Abraham Lincoln took a bullet by someone who was not 
willing to accept that progress meant acknowledging that Jefferson's 
words were true, as they were later manifest by Dr. King, once again, 
53 years ago in August in this city.
  Fast forward to 1933 and the 21st Amendment repealing prohibition, 
Franklin County, Virginia, dubbed the wettest county in America. And as 
we watched as jobs left the Fifth District of Virginia and opportunity 
seemingly left with them, we saw a wellspring of opportunity and 
economic development in the form, ironically, of wineries and 
distilleries and breweries. So when Burlington and Broyhill and Bassett 
and Lane and Dan River Mills left, distilleries and breweries and 
wineries crept in. It started in Franklin County, Virginia.
  Fast forward to 1944, Bedford, Virginia, June 6. The Allied invasion 
at Normandy, D-day. The Town of Bedford lost more of her sons per 
capita than any other town in the United States--19 in one day, more 
than decimating an entire graduating class and removing the best and 
brightest from that small Virginia locality.
  Notably, three other young men from Bedford died later in the 
Normandy campaign, bringing the total Bedford KIA during Normandy to 
22. And ironically, these men died serving in the Blue-Gray 29th 
Infantry Division, so named because it honored the fact that it brought 
soldiers from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line together to fight and 
bleed and die to free foreign women and men whom they had never met.
  Fast forward to 1951, Prince Edward County, Virginia, the hamlet of 
Farmville. Barbara Johns, a high school student, had an uncle who was a 
scholar, who discussed with her and her family over the dinner table 
the ideas expanded upon by Jefferson and the Declaration, and suggested 
that, indeed, all people were created equal. And this manifests itself 
through Barbara Johns in action. This teenage girl looked at the school 
that she attended, the Moton High School, and looked across the county 
to the all-White new high school and understood that if all people 
were, indeed, created equal, as her uncle had suggested as was written 
by Jefferson, then it was unfair that court cases like Plessy v. 
Ferguson that any law that said that separate but equal was anything 
close to a possible theoretical reality must be struck down.
  Now, I have passed by other residents of the Fifth District of 
Virginia. Patrick Henry, for example. John Marshall, for example. But 
back to Henry. Henry stood before the American Revolution and said: ``I 
know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or 
give me death.'' And from the back of the room someone shouted: 
Treason. And Patrick Henry responded, ``If this be treason, make the 
most of it,'' acknowledging that to do something great that he believed 
in he might need to die.
  Barbara Johns did that very same thing on April 23, 1951, when she 
led a walkout of Moton High School demanding an end to separate but 
equal segregation in Virginia, thus sparking the civil rights movement 
in Virginia that also can look to its forbearers and see Booker T. 
Washington, a civil rights leader amongst the last generation of 
African-American leaders born into slavery. His vision began to 
culminate when Johns led the student walkout in Prince Edward County 
that led to desegregation at the very risk of her life.
  Now, I like to liken Johns to Patrick Henry, both of whom are heroes 
of mine, as two people who were willing to stand up and do what they 
thought was right regardless of the fact that it, quite literally, 
might cost them their lives. They might die. But I tell people when I 
speak to them, the difference between Patrick Henry and Barbara Johns 
is Patrick Henry was a 37-year-old attorney trained to speak in front 
of people, and Barbara Johns was a teenage girl, and this happened in 
America as we worked to become a more perfect union.
  Fast forward to Pittsylvania County, where Deborah Coles, another 
hero of

[[Page 15350]]

mine, was born one of eight children to a tobacco sharecropper. Growing 
up in a Virginia where racism was far too evident and common, Deborah 
Coles bucked the odds, learned a work ethic from her mother and father, 
became the first in her family to attend college, attending Virginia 
State University, and later going on into public education where she 
was and is an educator and an administrator in the small town where I 
went to high school and where she had undoubtedly touched the lives of 
innumerable thousands of students over the decades--finding ways to say 
yes, finding means to encourage thought, finding ways to stimulate 
young minds. And she did this despite the ridiculous challenges faced 
by her forbearers, and she did it here as we worked to become a more 
perfect union in America.
  Fast forward to the 21st century. Servicemembers, not unlike their 
brethren from Bedford who fell on June 6 at D-day, just a handful of 
the sacrifice from the Fifth District of VA, 1-435th of our Nation.
  Humayun Khan, a graduate of the aforementioned University of 
Virginia, who, at risk to himself, moved his soldiers away and sought 
to determine whether or not a vehicle approaching the point where he 
was working was a threat, and ultimately, in protecting those with whom 
he served, gave his life wearing the uniform of a nation to which his 
parents had immigrated.

                              {time}  2130

  Sergeant Andrew Crabtree, a Special Forces soldier who served 
multiple tours defending America in the global war on terror and 
recently passed to the next life from a cancer deemed to have been 
service-related.
  And Seaman Dakota Rigsby, the son of working class folks from 
Fluvanna County, Virginia, in the Fifth District, who tragically 
perished while wearing the uniform of this Nation, defending that which 
is worth defending, aboard the USS Fitzgerald.
  Then, moving to today, and reason number 10, although, to be fair, 
Booker T. Washington, Patrick Henry, and John Marshall could make this 
13 if I counted them separately, and that is the families of Pastor 
Hassan and Abdumawla, Christians from the Republic of Sudan, who, after 
about 9 months of work on our part and about 18 months of imprisonment 
on the part of the two gentlemen I named, have now moved to Buckingham 
County, Virginia, where they have an opportunity to experience a land 
where they are free to stand or sit when the anthem is played, where 
they are free to worship or not worship as they feel compelled, and 
where no dream is too big.
  I would wager that, having lived in a foreign land and not having 
been amongst those 1 in 25 or 26, roughly, fortunate enough to have 
been born here in this imperfect land perpetually seeking to be a more 
perfect Union, I would wager that, when our national anthem is played, 
these newest residents of Virginia's Fifth Congressional District will 
choose to stand. I hope, when you think of the sacrifices made by 
millions who came before us, that you will, too.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________