Lynn C. Woolsey: “I rise today with a heavy, heavy heart. When we turn on the television or the radio or open a newspaper, what we hear…”

“I rise today with a heavy, heavy heart. When we turn on the television or the radio or open a newspaper, what we hear and what we read is the great sadness that accompanies the deaths of so very many people around our world. Reading the newspaper this week, we read that the lives of innocent men, women, and children are being taken in such disparate places as Sudan and Uganda in Africa; Israel, the Palestinian territories and Iraq in the Middle East; Haiti in the Caribbean; Chechnya and Afghanistan in Asia; and countless others places around the world. Today, another distressing event took place, the beheading of an American civilian in Iraq, a video of which was posted on a militant Islamic Web site. This was a man who ventured to Iraq to help with the rebuilding of its infrastructure, a man whose only crime was traveling to an unstable country, thinking he might be able to make a contribution in the midst of all the chaos. He was 26 years old. This is a terrible tragedy. But we are no longer surprised to hear that tragedies of this sort are occurring every day around the world. No country is immune. No group of people can avoid the misfortune that is accompanied by simply existing, by simply being alive in today's world. In Haiti, for example, hundreds of innocent people have died of starvation. They are so hungry they are eating cakes made of butter, salt, water and mud. Mud. Yet here in the United States we do not act.”