John Edwards For President
http://www.johnedwards.com/news/spee...inter-meeting/
Why are we here?
We are here because somewhere in America an eight-year old girl goes to sleep hungry, a little girl who ought to be drawing pictures and learning multiplication cries herself to sleep, praying that her father, who has been out of work for two years, will get a job again. It doesn’t have to be that way.
We are here because somewhere in America, a hotel housekeeper walks a picket line with her union brothers and sisters fighting for decent health care benefits during the day and works the late-shift at a diner at night so that she and her family can live a decent life and so her boy can go to college and have choices she never had. And somewhere a young man folds a college acceptance letter and puts it in his drawer because even with his part-time job and his mother’s second job, he knows he cannot afford to go. It doesn’t have to be that way.
We are here because somewhere in America a mother wipes her hand on a dishcloth to go answer a knock on her door … and opens it to find an army chaplain and an officer standing there with solemn faces and her boy’s name – her patriotic son who enlisted after September 11 – on their lips. It doesn’t have to be that way.
We are here because somewhere in the world, a 5-year old boy in a refugee camp is bending under the weight of his 2-year old sister. His family massacred, he carries his remaining sister everywhere, and sleeps with his arms wrapped tightly around her, knowing that tomorrow he will have to do the same thing, and again the next day and the day after that because she is all the family he has now. It doesn’t have to be that way.
We are here because somewhere in America a father comes home from the second shift and feels a raging fever on the brow of his sleeping daughter as he kisses her goodnight. And now, bone-weary and worried, he cradles that child in his arms at the emergency room, because there is nowhere else for him to go. It doesn’t have to be that way.
They are why we are here. Because everywhere in America, people are counting on us to stand up for them.
And so I ask you, will you stand up for that tired father forced into emergency rooms to get health care for his little girl?
Will you stand up for the brave young boy in the refugee camp?
Will you stand up for the working men and women in our labor movement who have to fight for decent working conditions and living wages?
Will you stand up for the young man who knows that education is his way out of the cycle of poverty and yet it seems beyond his grasp?
Will you stand up for that hungry eight-year old girl so she doesn’t give up on her life before it’s even begun?
Will you stand up for all the American families whose loved ones are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Will you stand up?
So, will you speak out? Will you stand up?
These are the great moral imperatives of our time. And by breaking the silence we are not breaking faith with our flag or our forefathers or our brave young men and women in uniform. We are keeping faith with America.
Because we are better than this. We are better than this.
We should be the bright light, the beacon for all the world.
We are not the country of the Superdome in New Orleans after Katrina;
We are not the country of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo;
We are not the country of secret surveillance and government behind closed doors.
We are Americans, and we’re better than that. . .
