Pity he didn't think about that when he was busy supporting, sponsoring, and voting for our current national endeveaour in Iraq. I guess that poverty there matters less, is a little less personal when it is half a world away. No matter, if those Iraqis will just take responsibilty for themselves, in a way of course, that is acceptable to our national interests in the region.
As for the evocation of Dr. King, I find it interesting to read Dr. King's original Riverside Church speech and then compare it with J.E.'s. The Senator has glommed onto the "Silence is Betrayal" theme (catchy, ain't it?!) yet when reading the good Reverend's speech, well, there simply is no comparison...Some excerpts of Dr. King's speech:
"The Importance of Vietnam
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."
(Poverty is personal)
King again. "They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?"
(Poverty is personal)
Edwards has never demonstrated any kind of understanding of what the people of Iraq have endured, has never touched on the motives that sent us there, and seems unconcerned about the damage we have wrought. He tells us, "the question is not how we got into this war, the question is how do we get out?" I disagree. The question is very much how did we get in, for if we do not learn from that, we run the risk of making the same mistake again and again and again. King puts it thus:
"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
(Poverty is personal)
Now, while Edwards makes several comments about Sudan and Darfur and the suffering of the people there, if he makes any comment at all about the suffering of the people in Iraq, I've missed it. He does mention that the Iraqis need to take responsibilty, for whatever that's worth. His is a markedly politcal speech for personal gain and nauseatingly obsequious and shallow in tone and content. King's, in terms of understanding, rhetoric, power and depth of ideas and expression, is in another world altogether.
King's full speech here:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.htmlEdwards in action here (unfortunately, no transcript):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq1iSit7K60Poverty is personal.
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