From: eyc@acpub.duke.edu (EMIL CHUCK)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton,talk.politics.misc,alt.rush-limbaugh,alt.politics.bush,alt.politics.elections
Subject: SPEECH OF THE WEEK: Jesse Jackson's speech
Summary: Democratic National Convention: the Moral Center
Date: 11 Sep 92 22:43:23 GMT
Followup-To: alt.politics.clinton
Organization: Duke University; Durham, N.C.

I haven't seen this speech posted, so I'll post it myself. I'm presenting
this speech solely for the sake of beneficial discussion. Spelling errors
are my own. Taken without permission from journal "Vital Speeches of the
Day."




Democratic National Convention: the Moral Center
Jesse L. Jackson, President and Founder of the Rainbow Coalition
Delivered before the Democratic National Convention, New York NY Jul 14 92

Chairman Ron Brown, you've done a difficult job well. You have brought
down barriers. Your work makes us proud. President Bill Clinton. You have
survived a tough spring. It will make you stronger in the fall. With
your stripes you must heal and make us better. The hopes of many depend
upon your quest. Be comforted that you do not stand alone.

Vice President Al Gore comes to this task tested and prepared. He has been
a reasoned voice for environmental sanity, a supporter of social justice,
an original sponsor for DC statehood. And I, for one, look forward to the
vice-presidential debate.

We stand as witnesses to a pregnant moment in history. Across the globe,
we feel the pain that comes with new birth. Here, in our country, pain
abounds. We must be certain that it too leads to new birth, and not a
tragic miscarriage of opportunity.

We must turn pain to power, pain into partnership, not pain into polarization.

The great temptation in these difficult days of racial polarization and
economic injustice is to make political arguments black and white, and miss
the moral imperative of wrong and right. Vanity asks -- is it popular?
Politics asks -- will it win? Morality and conscience ask -- is it right?

We are part of a continuing struggle for justice and decency, links in a
chain that began long before we were born and will extend long after we
are gone. History will remember us not for our positioning, but for our
principles. not by our move to the political center, left or right, but
rather by our grasp on the moral and ethical center of wrong and right.

We who stand with working people and poor have a special burden. We must
stand for what is right, stand up to those who have the might. We do so
grounded in the faith, that what is morally wrong will never be politically
right. But if it is morally sound, it will eventually be politically right.

When I look at you gathered here today, I hear the pain and see the
struggles that prepared the ground that you stand on. We have come a long
way from where we started.

A generation ago -- in 19964, Fanny Lou Hamer had to fight even to sit
in this convention. Tonight, 28 years later, the chair of the Party is
Ron Brown from Harlem; the manager is Alexis Herman, an African-American
woman from Mobile, Alabama. We have come a long way from where we started.

We are more interdependent than we realize. Not only African-Americans
benefitted from the movement for justice. It was only when African-Americans
were free to win and sit in these seats, that Bill Clinton and Al Gore from
the new South could be able to stand on this rostrum. We are inextricably
bound together in a single garment of destiny. Red, yellow, brown, black and
white, we are all precious in God's sight. We have come a long way from
where we started.

Tonight, we have another challenge. Ten million Americans are unemployed,
25 million on food stamps, 35 million in poverty, 40 million have no
health care. From the coal miners in Bigstone Gap, WV, to the loggers
and environmentalists in Roseburg, OR, from displaced textile workers in
my hometown of Greenville, SC, to plants closing in Van Nuys, CA, pain
abounds. Plants are closing, jobs leaving on a fast track, more are working
for less, trapped by repressive anti-labor laws. The homeless are a source
of national shame and disgrace.

There is a harshness to America that comes from not seeing and a growing
mindless materialism. Our television sets bring the world into our living
rooms, but too often we overlook our neighbors.

We have a President who has traveled the world, but has never been to
Hamlet, NC. Yet we must not overlook Hamlet.

It was there that 25 workers died in a fire at Imperial Foods, more women
than men, more white than black. They worked making chicken parts in vats
heated to 400 degrees, with few windows and no fans. The owners locked the
doors on the outside. The workers died trapped by economic desperation and
oppressive work laws.

One woman came up to me after the fire -- she said: "I want to work. I don't
want to go on welfare. I have three children and no husband. We pluck 90
wings a minute. Now I can't bend my wrist, I got the carpel thing. Then
when we're hurt they fire us, and we have no health insurance, and no
union to help us. We can't get another job because we're crippled, so they
put us on welfare and call us lazy."
I said you are not lazy, and you are not alone.

Her friend, a white woman came up and said: "I'm 7 months pregnant. We
stand in two inches of water with two five-minute bathroom breaks. Sometimes
we can't hold our water, and then our bowels, and we faint."
We wept together.

If we keep Hamlet in our hearts and before our eyes, we will act to
empower working people. We will protect the right to organize and strike.
We will empower workers to enforce health and safety laws. We will provide
a national health care system, a minimum wage sufficient to bring workers
out of poverty, paid parental leave. We must build a movement for
economic justice across the land.

We face a difficult challenge. Our cities have been abandoned, farmers
forsaken, children neglected. Floods in Chicago; fires in L.A. They say they
can't find $35 billion for the mayors, but the latest down payment for
the S&L bailout was $25 billion. It is time to break the mold.

Now is the time to rebuild America. We must be the party with the
plan and the purpose. Four years ago we fought for a program to reinvest in
America, paid for by fair taxes on the rich and savings from the military.
This year, Governor Bill Clinton has taken a substantial step in that
direction. He has expressed Democratic support for DC statehood, same day
on-site universal voter registration. He has vowed to challenge corporations
to invest at home, retrain their workers and pay their share of taxes. He
has made a committment to raising and indexing the minimum wage. We must
build upon that direction and go further still.

In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt ran on a "balance-the-budget" platform in the
middle of a recession. Working people in motion pushed him into the New
Deal. The impetus for change will not come top down, it must come bottom up.

The Rainbow Coalition has put forward a "Rebuild America Plan." At its heart
is a proposal, with the aid of Felix Rohatyn, one of America's leading
experts in public finance, for an American Investment Bank. There are 
$3 trillion in public and private pension funds that with government
guarantees could provide $500 billion in seed money, and attract an
additional $500 billion to create a ten-year $1 trillion plan to rebuild
America. Pension funds are the workers money. That money is now used to
prop up South Africa, for LBOs and high risk speculation and greed. We
should use the workers' money, with the workers' consent and government
guarantees, to secure our future by rebuilding America.

We must have a plan on a scale that corresponds with the size of the problems
we face. Taiwan has a $1 trillion plan -- it is the size of Pennsylvania.
Japan has a $3 trillion plan over ten years. We found the money to help
rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II, we found the money to help
Russia and Poland. We found $600 billion to bail out the mess left by the
buccaneer bankers. Surely we can find the money to rebuild America and put
people back to work.

We have a vision sufficient to correspond with the size of our opportunity.
Across the world, walls are coming down. The Cold War is over; the Soviet
Union is no more. Russia wants to join NATO. We can change our priorities,
reinvest in educating our children, train our workers, rebuild our cities.
Today Japan makes fast trains; we make fast missiles. If we change our
priorities, and build a high speed national railroad, we could go from
NY to LA in 8 hours. We could make the steel, lay the rail, build the cars,
and drive them. Scientists can stop devising weapons we don't need and
start working on environmental advances we can't live without.

We must have an imagination strong enough to see beyond war. In Israel,
Prime Minister Rabin's election is a step toward greater security and peace
for the entire region. Rabin's wisdom in affirming negotiation over
confrontation, land for peace, bargaining table over battlefield has inspired
hope, not only in the hearts of democratic Israel, but on the West Bank.
Israeli security and Palestinian self-determination are inextricably bound,
two sides of the same coin. If peace talks continue, this generation may be
able to witness a Middle East tasting the fruits of peace.

In Africa today, democracy is on the march. In Nigeria, we witnessed
successful elections last week. But democracy cannot flourish amid economic
ruins. Democracy protects the right to vote; it does not insure that you can
eat. Today, President Deuf of Senegal, head of development for the
Organization of African Unity, is pushing for African development. Like other
regions in the world, Africa needs debt relief and credits so it can have
the opportunity to grow.

We must understand that development in the Third World and economic
prosperity at home are inextricably bound. We can be a force for peace in
the Middle East, development to Africa and Latin America, hope in Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Politics cannot be reduced to a matter of money and ambition. We must stay
true to our values, or lose our way.
	- In 1939, 900 Jews were turned away from the shores of Miami by
the US government, sent back to Germany haunted by Hitler.
	- In 1942, 120,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up and put in
American concentration camps.
	- In 1992, the US government is turning Haitians away, back into
the arms of death, and relaxing sanctions on South Africa.

It was anti-Semitic and wrong in 1939 to lock the Jews out. It was racist
and wrong in 1942 to lock the Japanese-Americans up. And it is racist and
wrong in 1992 to lock the Haitians out and abandon Nelson Mandela in South
Africa. South Africa remains a terrorist state. Sanctions should be
reimposed until the interim government is established.

We hear a lot of talk about family values, even as we spurn the homeless
on the street. Remember, Jesus was born to a homeless couple, outdoors in
a stable, in the winter. He was the child of a single mother. When Mary
said Joseph was not the father, she was abused. If she had aborted the
baby, she would have been called immoral. If she had the baby, she would
have been called unfit, without family values. But Mary had family values.
It was Herod -- the Quayle of his day -- who put no value on the family.

We who would be leaders must feel and be touched by people's pain. How
can you be a doctor and not touch the sick? How can yoou be a leader and not
touch the hurt? Gandhi adopted the untouchables. Dr. King marched with
violent gang members, hoping to turn them to the discipline of non-violence.

Above all, we must reach out and touch our children. Our children are
embittered and hurt, but it is not a congenital disease. They were not
born that way. They live amidst violence and rejection, in broken streets,
broken glass, broken sidewalks, broken families, broken hearts. Their music,
their rap, their video, their art reflects their broken world. We must
reach out and touch them.

Before the riots in Los Angeles, Rep. Maxine Waters and I visited the
Imperial Courts and Nickerson Gardens housing projects in Watts, where we
spent the night with our children, and then visited the youth detention
center with Arsenio Hall and James Almos. We listened to the youth describe
their busted and deferred dreams. They suffer 50% unemployment, with no
prospects of a job or going to college. It costs $5,000 to send them to
high school, $34,000 to send them downtown to the youth detention center.

For many of them, jail is a step up. In jail, they are safe from drive-by
shootings. In jail, it's warm in the winter, cool in the summer. In jail,
they get three balanced meals, access to health care, education and
vocational training. Everything they should have on the outside, they only
get on the inside.

Too many of our children see jail as a relief station, and death as a land
beyond pain. We must reach out and touch them. Surely it is better to have
dirty hands and clean hearts than clean hands and a dirty heart.

If we reach out, we can win -- and deserve to win. We have heard many
different arguments about a winning strategy -- whether to rally the base
or appeal to those who have strayed. but these are not choices. We will win
only if we put forth a vision that corresponds with the size of our
problems and the scope of our opportunity, if we reach out to those in
despair and those who care, reach across the lines that divide race, region,
or religion.

As for the Rainbow Coalition, we will continue to build a movement for
economic justice in this land. We will work to mobilize working and poor
people to change the course of this country. We will join in defeating George
Bush in the fall -- that is a necessary first step.

We must continue to build. When Roosevelt came to office, a movement of
working people made a new deal possible. When Kennedy came to office, he did
not teach Dr. King about civil rights; Dr. King led a movement that made
civil rights unavoidable. When Bill Clinton comes to office, we must
build a movement that keeps economic justice at the forefront of the
agenda.

I know it's dark. But in the dark, the flame of hope still burns.

In L.A., they focused on Rodney King beaten by white officers, who were
acquitted by an all-white jury. But it was a white man who had the instinct
and the outrage to film it and make it public. The media focus was on the
white truck driver beaten by black youth. But it was four young black
youth who stepped in and saved his life, good samaritans.

In the final analysis it comes down to a question of character. On a small
Southern college campus, I once observed a lesson never to be forgotten.
I saw a dwarf and a giant walking together -- they were an odd couple. He
was 6'3", she was 3' tall. When they reached the parting paths, they
embraced. He handed her her books and she skipped down the path. It looked
to be romantic. I asked the president -- what is this I am seeing? He said,
I thought you would ask. You see, that is his sister, in fact his twin
sister. By a twist of fate, he came out a giant and she a dwarf. All the
big schools offered him athletic scholarships. The pros offered him
money. But he said I can only go where my sister can go. And so he ended
up here with us.

Some where that young man learned ethics, caring for others. Few of us are
driven by a tailwind. Most of us struggle with headwinds. Not all of us
can be born tall, some are born short, motherless, abandoned, hungry,
orphaned. Somebody has to care. It must be us. And if we do, we will win
and deserve to win.

Keep hope alive.
*** END ***
-- 
Emil Thomas Chuck (Duke BME '93)		eyc@acpub.duke.edu
I'm too busy for my class, too busy for my clubs, too busy for my work.
I'm too busy for my mail, too busy for my news, too busy for my calls.
I'm too busy for this .sig. 
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton,alt.news-media,talk.politics.misc