Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. But I will also go through the federal budget, line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less – because we cannot meet twenty-first century challenges with a twentieth century bureaucracy.
John Kerry believes in America. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary.
It wasn’t until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma. And it’s around this time that some pastors I was working with came up to me and asked if I was a member of a church. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.
And it offends our conscience. Well it’s time for them to own their failure. Part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. We measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage; whether you can put a little extra money away at the end of each month so you can someday watch your child receive her college diploma. The fourth issue that I will address is democracy.