The truths we hold - november 2024

This book comes in the Albanian language at the same time that its author is one of the two rival candidates in the most important and followed elections in the world. Not only this year, but since the election entered the pages of newspapers and radio channels, then television and recently also social networks, the election for the man or women who enters the White House once every four years has been central in attention of anyone with access to the information. This year's election has grabbed the spotlight more than ever, not simply because it has the most coverage ever, thanks to the further expansion of humanity's access to information over the last four years, but also because it comes in a time when the world and people are experiencing upheaval, dilemma and dramatic uncertainty unlike anything experienced since World War II.

It is no coincidence that for the Oval Office, where there is the chair and the desk of the president of the United States of America, is used the expression "the most important office in the world". For Albanians, for 34 years, that office has become a point of reference for our expectations from politics, not only from the developments in the region and the world, but also for the developments here in Albania. But, for us, unlike many others around the world, the choice of the person who will enter the Oval Office, is not fundamentally related to the name of the person in the sense of the political affiliation there. Because for us, in these 34 years, America has turned from the "Devil" who wanted to eat our heads, to the "Angel" protecting our difficult path to build a democratic state of law.

In December 1990, we Albanians wanted with all the strength of our souls that Albania be like all of Europe. Free and Democratic. At that time, we did not know what democracy was and where it differed from freedom or freedom from it. For us, democracy and freedom were the same thing. But we did not distinguish freedom itself from liberation from dictatorship, and for us the second was enough to have the first. But what we could do with it, how we could live it, why it was endangered even in the absence of dictatorship or what we would have to do when freedom was threatened in the name of its very name, we didn't have any idea at all. Because our existential challenge was liberation, not freedom and democracy. The whole people knew this like the morning sun, when they took to the streets that December and were freed from the dictatorship.

These 34 years of ups and downs of unimaginable efforts for any of us when this countdown started, we have realized that living in democracy is a daily challenge. An obstacle course where old and new paths, twists and traps make values, achievements and dreams feel at every level constantly challenged and threatened.

This book, "The Truths we Hold", through lived human stories, affirms with the strength of examples that today universal rights are not yet a universal reality even in the central hearth of world democracy, in the United States of America. In its pages it is narrated that the rights and freedoms acquired by the generations, which we enjoy together, carry through us the trust to protect them from the threats of an era of selfishness and greed. These threats are real and will most likely continue to become even more present for those who will inherit the victories of democratic societies. The author shows her passion for being useful to individuals in communities in difficulty, combining the power of the right of representation and decision-making with human empathy for the weakest, whom she has encountered in prisons, on the streets, in the suburbs, in the borders of America in the detention centers or in those for the rehabilitation of trafficked women, for minors separated from their parents and convicted of illegal immigration, for victims of drugs and violence, or for convicts after removing the handcuffs. She believes that communication with the weakest is an increased source of power for the word, the will, the eyes of the mind to understand the world and of course, for the purpose of public engagement.

"The Truths we Hold" comes to us from a prosecutor and senator in the role of a witness. Kamala Harris has collected facts and evidence that shed light on cases of missing justice for the individual, group and community. A prosecutor placed in the position of an attorney, has defended in the book all those whose origin, economic difficulties, geographical and historical circumstances, gender, make them big losers in the life of the most developed democracy on the planet. It turns them into victims by throwing them into the lap of adventure, discrimination and injustice.

This prosecutor turned senator, who sees the power on the side of the victim, with the awareness that a crime against anyone is a crime against society, also sees the work of prosecutors as power source for the unheard voices, as an opportunity to understand the reasons for the crime and not only its consequence. At the foundation of the book are rights and justice as a natural inner call and as inseparable notions.

Reading the book is an opportunity in itself, since in this book talks about herself a prosecutor who graduated from Howard University, where "you entered as you were and you left as the person you aspired to become". She chose to decline the offer to take the post of Attorney General of America because, as the author recounts in the book, she had a job she loved and still had work to do. Whoever reads the book, would love the prosecutor to be like her. For us Albanians, human freedom is the achievement of all achievements in history, which makes us part of that part of today's world, where beyond the challenges and crises of democracy, people are free and coexist in a legal order that guarantees their freedom. But it also makes us responsible for it. Written precisely with the mind's eye on freedom, "The Truths we Hold" is a book that makes possible to reflect about freedom in the time we are living, through the life and career of an inspiring woman.