MOYERS: A Great But Broken Promise

[kpete]

A Great but Broken Promise
By Bill Moyers
TomPaine.com

Wednesday 23 May 2007



America's a great promise but it's a broken promise.

It's not right that we are entering the fifth year of a war started on a suspicion. Whatever your party or politics, my young friends, America can't sustain a war begun under false pretenses because it is simply immoral to ask people to go on dying for the wrong reasons. We cannot win a war when our leaders don't have the will or courage to ask everyone to sacrifice, and place the burden on a few hundred thousand Americans from the working class led by a relative handful of professional officers. As is often said - America's not fighting the war; the American military is fighting the war, everyone else is at the mall. Our leaders are not even asking us to pay for it. They're borrowing the money and passing the IOU's to you and your kids.



America needs fixing. Our system of government is badly broken.

You are leaving here as our basic constitutional principles are under assault - the rule of law, an independent press, independent courts, the separation of church and state, and the social contract itself. I am sure you learned about the social contract here at SMU. It's right there in the Constitution - in the Preamble: "We, the People" - that radical, magnificent, democratic, inspired and exhilarating idea that we are in this together, one for all and all for one.

I believe this to be the heart of democracy. I know it to be a profoundly religious truth. Over in East Texas where I grew up, my father's greatest honor, as he saw it, was to serve as a deacon in the Central Baptist Church. In those days we Baptists were, in matters of faith, sovereign individualists: the priesthood of the believer, soul freedom, "Just you and me, Lord." But time and again, as my dad prayed the Lord's Prayer, I realized that it was never in the first person singular. It was always: "Give us this day our daily bread." We're all in this together; one person's hunger is another's duty.


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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052407B.shtml

[tabasco]

1. What a wonderful sppech. Moyers is a great mind.

Someone I appreciate more every time I read his words.

[Solly Mack]

2. America's broken - period.

[cyberpj]

3. Excellent. Moving. And to the truthful point, as usual. Bravo Mr. Moyers! And I pray with you.

God help us all now.