I'll give you a little preview...
Your comment is utter BS. Poor people (when not being disenfranchised & actually having voting machines to vote with) vote in
great numbers, standing in line for
hours to exercise their right to vote. How many
privileged Americans would do that?
"those experiencing poverty don't vote"?!?!?!? Where the hell have you been? In your cushy suburb, looking down your nose at poor people?
God forbid Jim Wallis & Sojourners insist that poverty be at the forefront of the 2008 presidential campaign... why, their efforts might be a success! No longer will the
privileged be able to look away & ignore poverty, justifying their indifference w/comments like "the poor don't even vote"! It may not be possible any longer to ignore the needs of 37
million people (roughly 12% of the US population... more than 1 out of 10 people in this country)! No longer will "poverty isn't a winning issue" be an acceptable excuse!
To Jim Wallis & Sojourners I say "BRAVO!!! God bless you all!!!"
To those that would ignore poverty, I offer words from Elie Weisel...
The Perils of IndifferenceElie Wiesel
(excerpt)
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century's wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps -- and I'm glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance -- but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler's armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.
The full speech (text & audio) is available @
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/wiesel.htm Today... a different time, a different place.
We
know.
In the future, how will we each answer the question, "What did you do for 'The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees', the hungry, the poor, the destitute?"
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