Byron Dorgan: “I conclude by describing one of the concerns I have about the silence on these issues. Some long while ago, I was on the…”

“I conclude by describing one of the concerns I have about the silence on these issues. Some long while ago, I was on the floor of the House of Representatives when there was a joint meeting of Congress. A fellow named Lech Walesa was speaking to Congress at a joint meeting. Lech Walesa told a story--pretty unbelievable--a story, of course, I had known from the history books. He told us this: He said it was Saturday morning in a shipyard in Gdansk, Poland. He had been fired from his job as an electrician from this plant. He went back into the shipyards on Saturday morning to lead a labor strike against the Communist government, believing workers ought to have the right to self-determination. He went back in to lead a strike against the Communist government. They seized him that Saturday morning and brutally beat him, beat him bloody, took him to the edge of a fence that was heightened with barbed wire and threw him over the barbed-wire fence into the dirt on the other side of the fence. He laid in the dirt face down, bleeding, having been beaten severely. He told us he wondered what he should do next. As he lay there, he decided what to do next. He picked himself up, climbed back over the fence into the shipyard, right back into the same shipyard that morning. Ten years later, this unemployed electrician was identified by the Doorkeeper of the U.S.…”