The whole point of the American ideal is that opportunity is always present for all of us. Yet this chance is being denied to millions of working families who are trapped in a prison of poverty. Tonight, nearly one-fifth of the children in this country are ill fed, ill housed, and ill educated. When there's a natural disaster, a hurricane or a flood, we don't talk about repairing a roof here and a window there, a house here and a bridge there. We make an enormous investment in restoring things to the way they were before disaster struck.
Child poverty is just such a disaster.
Most of us would never turn our backs on a starving child yet everyday we ignore 13 million poor children in America. If all of them were gathered in one place, they would create a city bigger than New York, and we would then see child poverty as 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 healthcare for all depends on our will to defeat the special interests and return politics to the people. And vulnerable to the influence of money.