The Nation.

This Brave Nation: Peace Takes Courage

By Brave Nation

June 16, 2008

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It's hard to call someone younger than 18 years old a "legend," but Ava Lowery is just that in progressive circles. She created a website at fourteen where she made videos railing against the war in Iraq. Today, her site, peacetakescourage.com, gets nearly two million hits per month. And she doesn't live in a liberal hotbed like San Francisco or New York, rather in a small town in Alabama. Anthony Romero is the son of Puerto Rican emigrants and grew up to not only be the first in his family to go to college, but to become the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union--the first Latino and openly gay head of the venerable organization, and someone we thought Ava should have on her cell phone speed dial. Just in case. Together they discuss the legal quagmire the country has sunk into since 9/11, among other quagmires created by George W. Bush and his Administration.

A kind of "living history" project composed of short videotaped conversations, This Brave Nation brings together the most intelligent, passionate and creative voices of one generation with the activists, journalists and artists of the next to dialogue on loves, lives, politics and history. Each discussion will be produced as both a five-minute video and a thirty-minute mini-documentary, which will be collected in a DVD box set. A new video will be released each Sunday over the next few weeks leading up to a live event in Los Angeles on July 13.

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