IN MEMORIAM

Linda Everett:
A Fighter for Life and Beauty

Linda Cellini Everett passed away August 10, 2022 following complications from hip surgery, at age 75. Her friends and family had lost count of how many surgeries she had survived, and it came as a shock.

She was a force of Nature. Her unique power to move others through her writings, her paintings, and her love, had a worldwide importance in the fight for civilization. To help understand her contributions to humanity, a small slice of her life and work is given here, with some useful links.

Studying Love and Art

Linda learned to be a mother and sister to the world from what she did in her own family. Her very Italian parents raised four boys and Linda in West Philadelphia, and she helped to raise her two younger brothers. She looked closely to their health, and their intellects. One brother noted that “she brought art and music into our life.… It was amazing how she described what classical music was about.”

The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, to which Linda received a scholarship, in turn awarded her a full scholarship to study and travel in Europe. Linda subsequently chose to dedicate her life to organizing a better world for all of humanity, using her artistic talents to do so. Meeting organizers from Lyndon LaRouche’s International Caucus of Labor Committees at Temple University, she joined his pre-eminent movement. She memorably prepared signs and banners for organizers to take to the streets. A trained artist, she did not just make a poster (and it would be a misnomer to call them posters). She prepared huge signs that had her own distinctive artist’s touch with a sketch (and maybe a touch of Los Caprichos) but with an anti-war theme—and woe to anyone who did not bring them back in shape to be reused!

Moving to New York City, she soon brought in her study of science in drawing, and of nurturing, as the forceful leader of daycare and camp life for organizers’ children, as many of them remember.

Club of Life Leader

In 1982, when Helga Zepp-LaRouche founded the Club of Life for a worldwide fight against Malthusian genocide, Linda made it a personal mission to which she was fiercely committed. She researched and authored countless exposés of the Club of Rome and other perpetrators, coauthoring EIR’s 1988 Special Report, How To Stop the Resurgence of Nazi Euthanasia Today (a handbook on the death lobby and its economic theories). Her case studies showed how the Wall Street system looted medical care, including the nation’s veterans’ hospitals. She interviewed hospital officials, doctors, nurses and pharmacists to get the conditions on the front lines.

She could not be convinced that there is any life not worthy of being lived! She aggressively contended that ensuring access to healthcare, to the fruits of the most advanced research and progress, is a universal right for rich or poor throughout the world. Countering evil, she always showed cures that were being developed, new pain remedies, the solutions available to suffering people when medicine is allowed to be decided by science and morality (twin concepts). See her stunning October 1991 EIR report on the advances in securing recovery for coma patients, “Medical Advances Expose Lies of the Euthanasia Lobby.”

When her own personal medical problems multiplied, Linda addressed them in the same spirit: always searching for creative solutions to what might otherwise seem insurmountable, encouraging her medical teams to think likewise.

How Dope Actually Kills

Linda’s unsettling insistence on the full social truth in the fight for life, is shown in her report on the Netherlands, where outright euthanasia was legalized:

The explosion of open shops … to purchase … your choice of legal drugs, led directly to a huge depletion of the capable workforce, [and] to the predictable loss of national tax income (no work/no tax), which in turn meant loss of major funding nationally for the hospital and healthcare system. Rapidly, a policy of enforced medical austerity meant vastly increased killing off of the allegedly “terminally ill” and sick seniors in their homes. The proportion of the formerly vibrant workforce slipped precipitously in the country as those in the prime of working age increasingly were declared “disabled” by drugs and thus, had to be supported by the nation’s rapid expansion of “social support.” In effect, open promotion of drugs in the country destroyed the workforce, increased outright Nazi murder in the home, and forced fierce austerity in its healthcare system.

Studying Motion

Art, politics and agapē were one for Linda. She knew we could look inside a frightened population and move them to action.

Ned Rosinsky recounts that,

one day in 2001 I was working with Linda Everett and Debbie Sonnenblick … doing clay sculptures of spiral seashells and a small bust of Abraham Lincoln. I noticed in the back of the room amid a pile of canvases, a painted sketch of a swan with partially outstretched wings about to take off. The majesty of this image was striking. I asked Linda about it. “Yes,” she said, “I have been working on it. I am trying to catch the moment of transition, from standing on the land to being in flight, with the wings in the process of being outstretched, the legs just starting to be pulled up.”

Linda expressed the same principle of motion, of transition, in a dialogue with Helga and the LaRouche Organization following a 2021 Schiller Institute Christmas concert. Linda remarked:

Why was the concert that we just gave so important? Because it went right to the soul of people. Some of us have lost loved ones in these last three weeks…. But for the people that we will be organizing [in this season] when they also have losses such as this, it cannot be something that holds them back. They have lost part of their hearts. But as you have often said, we must adopt the world…. We must ask people to open … though a part of the heart has been taken. No, the heart is like the earth…. It expands to hold the necessities, the needs, of its children. Of the women, the children, the huge part of Afghanistan, and the rest of the starving that will die, the heart has to open up to that. It is as a dove, as a swan, as a crane that would open its wings to hold all of these needs within those that we are organizing…. [They should not] feel that they have no ability to celebrate…. They are capable of doing it. Perhaps they have never had to, but they are capable. And we are the ones that have to ask…. We are able to expand our hearts and open them to these people.… The worst would be to say, “No, I’m hurting, I can’t do it.” No. The way to get beyond hurt, is to give, and that is what we need at this moment, when millions are dying. The heart has to open up to that….

Learning that a “still needed” surgeon, who had performed several remarkable surgeries on her, was retiring last year, Linda put her passion into a poem shared with close friends on her birthday, Valentine’s Day, 2021:

A Courageous Wind Once Came My Way

Who understood then how courage could heal body and soul?

Who was so graced by such?

Who dared to hope of it, dream of it whilst wracked with pain?

Yet, there it was, a Wind of Courage.

A glimmer of it rekindled something,

I dared not say, nor speak a word that it’d eclipse a chance.

Yes, a courageous wind came my way.

Not a wind that broils into Summer storms,

Nor, even that which promises Spring rain.

Not a machismo tornado that steals life and sulks away.

This was a wind of courage, of ideas,

and

Of a promise to again hold a brush and sing for others,

With the joy of all the Jen and Agapē that dwells within.

Yes, it was a courageous wind that one,

That stole away only monstrous pain and healed this soul.

Until it, too, then, stole away

For good reasons aplenty, no doubt.

Ach, how does one ever lift one’s eyes to seek,

To trust, another wind?

Will it be a broiling deluge?

A monstrous funnel that eclipses this life?

Ah,

Only know this, my gratefulness lives in Eternity

For all of you generous souls who shared your Light

with those of us who tremble.

cellini

Some of Linda’s Work

How to Stop the Resurgence of Nazi Euthanasia Today. EIR Special Report, 1988. Link

“Medical Advances Expose Lies of the Euthanasia Lobby,” EIR, Oct. 18, 1991. Link

“Assisted Suicide Is a Crime Under the Nuremburg Code,” EIR, Jan. 10, 1997. Link

“Twenty Years of Nazi Crimes as Law,” EIR, Jan. 10, 1997. Link

“How Wall Street ‘Shareholder Value’ Destroyed America’s Hospital System,” EIR, April 7, 2000. Link

“LaRouche Puts Spotlight on Veterans’ Healthcare,” EIR, Nov. 21, 2003. Link

“VA Losing the Ability to Care ‘For Him Who Has Borne the Battle’,” EIR, May 7, 2004. Link