Photo: Alex Welsh for The Intercept

I used to be a preacher. And one of the lessons that I would often teach my congregation is that in the Bible, in the days before Jesus’s death, his words had a unique urgency — almost as if he knew that he had to hurry up and say as many things that mattered as humanly possible. Now I’m not comparing my dear friend Ady Barkan to Jesus, but I have long since viewed any words that Barkan is able to utter nowadays as something that we should all stop and pay attention to. In 2016, Barkan, a beloved 32-year-old organizer with a newborn son, was diagnosed with ALS. And it has been really fucking aggressive ever since. First, it attacked his arms and legs, making it hard for Barkan to get around, but he kept pushing and working and fighting for causes until his arms and legs no longer worked. After he started using a wheelchair, ALS then began to impact his voice, but Barkan never stopped talking, never stopped fighting.

Now it has taken his audible voice altogether. Unable to move his body or speak a word out loud, Barkan, for the time being, uses special software that tracks his eye movements and allows him to communicate to the world through a computer-generated voice. And because he is determined to make the world a better place until his dying breath, today Barkan is doing something truly remarkable. This week, Barkan made an outrageously difficult trip from California to Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress about the necessity and value of Medicare for All. I was told that this may very well be the last trip he ever makes. It was incredibly difficult and because of the fragile nature of his health, cross-country flights are inadvisable. I’d like for you to put yourself in Barkan’s shoes for a moment. Imagine you were told that you could make one last flight, one more long trip, before you died. Few among us would have the focus and selflessness to make that last trip a journey to the U.S. Capitol to testify before Congress. I’d like to think I’d have the courage to do what Barkan just did, but I’m thinking that if I had one last flight in my life, I’d take it to the Caribbean somewhere to be dropped off at the beach. But Barkan’s different. He wants to know that with every breath and every blink of an eye that he has left, that he spent it fighting to make the world a better place for his son — and for all of us, really. So he’s going to be the one and only activist testifying before Congress today offering full-on support for Medicare for All.