When the founders of our republic said that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were the unalienable rights of all Americans, they didn't say anything about taking turns. They didn't say that it was your turn today to have life and liberty, but not tomorrow, that it was your turn tomorrow to pursue happiness, but not today. The whole point of the American ideal is that opportunity is always present for all of us. Yet the chance that this chance is being denied to millions of working families who are trapped in a prison of poverty. We make an enormous investment in restoring things the way they were before the disaster struck.
Child poverty is such a disaster.
Most of us would never turn our backs on a starving child. Yet every day we ignore 13 million poor children in this country. If all of them were gathered in one place, it would create a city bigger than New York, and we would then see child poverty for the slow-motion national disaster that it is. If we don't end child poverty in our lifetime, shame on me, shame on you, shame on all of us. But our ability to end child poverty and provide health care for all depends on our will to defeat the special interests and return politics to the people.