Tavares, FL, City Commission Meeting
20 March 2019
Karen Avizur (291 words - 1:32)

I would like to thank you for this opportunity to address Tavares in this invocation, speaking not just as an atheist but as a resident of Mount Dora, to bring us together for this meeting.

I’ve lived here less than a year, and have already made many friends among my neighbors and others in my community. We’re all appreciative to those officials who come together to better our society, who struggle with the laws, both moral and ethical. Who come to City Hall as representatives, and as citizens themselves, to do the best they can to encourage and preserve justice, equality, and the well being of every person in our vastly diverse society.

I’d like to recite a quote from Carl Sagan, one I’m particularly fond of, when he speaks of the photo Voyager 1 took of Earth, the Pale Blue Dot.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

I’m immensely grateful to those who work for our city and those who live in and support it, and hope that today’s meeting, and all that come after, continue to unite us as one community.