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America is good« Thread Started on Apr 28, 2007, 11:31am » -

Daily newsbrief journal for April 2007, also see http://www.usdemocrats.com/brief for a global 100-page perpetual brief and follow twitter @usdemocrats


America is good« Thread Started on Apr 28, 2007, 11:31am » -

Postby admin » Sat Jan 28, 2012 11:43 am

America is good« Thread Started on Apr 28, 2007, 11:31am » --------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Good Country By Senator Paul Wellstone and Bill Dauster This is the first chapter of the campaign book that Senator Wellstone and Bill Dauster wrote as Senator Wellstone considered a possible 2000 Presidential campaign. Senator Wellstone decided not to run for President in 1999, so the book went unpublished. The book was to be called, “A Better America.”Winter 1998-1999 America is good. Ours is a land of bounty and beauty, blessed by Providence. By most measures of quality, life in America at the dawn of the 21st Century surpasses that of nearly any other place or time.America is good. Ours is a people virtuous and benevolent, conscious of Providence. Part of what makes America good is that most Americans firmly believe in progress: Even in good times, we want a better America.It is distinctly American to contemplate what makes a nation good. And it is entirely American to want our Nation to be best. We are an aspiring people.Americans believe in practical good. We cherish “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” 1/ and share the philosopher’s creed that “[t]hat action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.” 2/ Americans are a utilitarian people.Most fundamentally, in a good country, life must be safe. In a good country, food must be available, the air and water must be pure, shelter must be within reach, people must be able to get health care, they must be safe from criminal harm, they must be defended from war, and they must be able to find rewarding work.Our good land, in the hands of the American farmer, has yielded most productively. America ranks behind only Denmark and Portugal in food available per person, while more than 800 million people in the developing world suffer from chronic undernourishment and fully two billion people do not get enough vitamin A, iron, and iodine. 3/ “Globally there is enough food to feed the world,” explained a UN official, “but it is not equally distributed and many people do not have the means to buy it.” 4/ Life is not good in countries like Mozambique, Burundi, Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Somalia, where people have less than half the food we do. 5/ And when a government like North Korea’s funnels its wealth into weapons while its children suffer devastating malnutrition, it must be called evil. 6/Yet, as rich in food as America is, too many here still feel the pangs of hunger. Fully 35 million Americans are hungry or at risk of hunger. 7/ Every year, 26 million Americans have to go to food banks for sustenance. 8/ Even with a strong economy, requests for emergency food assistance rose 16 percent in 1997, and an estimated 19 percent of those pleas went unanswered. 9/ A Minnesota teacher asked his class: “‘How many of you ate breakfast this morning?’ As he expected, only a few children raised their hands. So he continued, ‘How many of you skipped breakfast this morning because you don’t like breakfast?’ Lots of hands went up. ‘And how many of you skipped breakfast because you didn’t have time for it?’ Many other hands went up. He was pretty sure by then why the remaining children hadn’t eaten, but he didn’t want to ask them about being poor, so he asked, ‘How many of you skipped breakfast because your family doesn’t usually eat breakfast?’ A few more hands were raised. Finally he noticed a small boy in the middle of the classroom, whose hand had not gone up. Thinking the boy hadn’t understood, he asked, ‘And why didn’t you eat breakfast this morning?’ The boy replied, his face serious: ‘It wasn’t my turn.’” 10/
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