My final pre-election article was supposed to be about how the right wing isn’t as Christian it professes to be and how Bush’s use of Christianity only subverts and rapes the values he claims to purport. Aside from that being a 100 point word score, it was pretty much going to be an article discussing how the values of Christianity are more liberal than conservative.
Instead I ran out of time and patience. I had more important things to tend today, than to write a four page rant about politics.
I will leave you with some quotes from an RFK documentary that I watched tonight, that I felt were completely fitting. The conflicts to which Bobby Kennedy addresses in his victory address in California are not unlike those we face today. (In fact if you change Vietnam with Iraq, it very well could be a speech from this campaign):
“I think we can end the divisions within the United States. What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis. And that what has been going on with the United States over the period of that last three years, the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society, the divisions – whether it’s between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups, or in the war in Vietnam – that we can work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country”
And in his first major speech of the 1968 Nomination campaign critizing the Johnson Administraion of the esclation of the war in Iraq:
“Today I would speak to you of the third of those great crises: of the war in Vietnam. I come here, to this serious forum in the heart of the nation to discuss with you why I regard our policy there as bankrupt: not on the basis of emotion, but fact; not, I hope, in clichés — but with a clear and discriminating sense of where the national interest really lies.
I do not want — as I believe most Americans do not want — to sell out American interests, to simply withdraw, to raise the white flag of surrender. That would be unacceptable to us as a country and as a people. But I am concerned — as I believe most Americans are concerned — that the course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong. I am concerned — as I believe most Americans are concerned — that we are acting as if no other nations existed, against the judgment and desires of neutrals and our historic allies alike. I am concerned — as I believe most Americans are concerned — that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world.
I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese slaughtered; so that they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: “They made a desert, and called it peace.”
And I do not think that is what the American spirit is really all about.”
As a student of rhetoric hearing these speeches I was struck in awe of similarities to our current situation. I hope these words ring true and reveal the gravity of the situation we fact today. Iraq is the new Vietnam and we are still as divided today, as we were then, on issues both new and old. And this is a situation that demands action.
One of the interviewess of the documentary concluded the program with, “when we reflect on RFK’s loss, what we’re really morning is loss of opportunity for America” (or something to that effect). Let us not waste opportunities this year, and let us not morn the loss of opportunity for America on November 3rd. Please vote.
