Latimer To EF Students: Tarrytown, Not Trump, Is America
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By Barrett Seaman—
The peripatetic 16th District Congressman George Latimer popped in at EF, Education First, at its campus on the hill overlooking Tarrytown on Friday. He was there ostensibly to recognize EF for its contributions to Westchester County through its programs teaching English language and American culture to the tens of thousands of foreign students from hundreds of countries around the world who have come through the program since EF acquired the former Marymount College campus in 2008. A plaque inscribed with the citation Latimer read into the Congressional Record was presented to Shawna Marino, EF’s Vice President for Public Affairs and Community Relations.
Latimer took the occasion to dispel any notion these international students might have that the image of America they see reflected in Washington DC is the real America. “You are here in the United States of America at a very difficult time for our country,” he said to hundreds of students gathered in the rotunda of EF’s Butler Hall. “What I want you to appreciate is that this country is much bigger than any one person, any one man or woman.”
He proceeded to list what he clearly saw as offenses on the part of Donald Trump, though he never uttered the president’s name: regime change in Venezuela, which he allowed may well be deserved, “but the way it was done was very disrespectful;” using the U.S. military, the strongest in the world, “to play with it across the globe,” acting towards sovereign countries “like they are pieces on a Monopoly Board.”
“I don’t want you to go home and think that this (what emanates from the White House) is America,” he implored. “America and Americans are the people you see here in Tarrytown…I want that when you go home, you have made friends with a country that is your friend—even though at the moment it doesn’t look like it.”
“When you go home, report to your friends that you saw what was good in America, the good people of Tarrytown, the good people of Education First. That is America.”
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