Political Quotes

“today I have a heavy heart to mark the passing and commemorate the life of SSgt Edwin Rivera, a native of Waterford, CT, who lost his life in Afghanistan last week at the age of 28. Staff Sergeant Rivera, the only son of middle-class Puerto Rican parents who came to Connecticut in the 1970s, graduated from Waterford High School in 2000. And they were proud of young Edwin, who served his first deployment in 2006, even as they missed his presence. ``The center of the family shifts back to my house when Edwin is gone,'' his mother said. He was gone for 15 months, not the promised 12. And when he came home, he was changed by what he had seen. But he soon became the lively, committed family man, seeing his two sons, Rolando and Lorenzo, off to school, working at the Millstone nuclear powerplant, starting a new life with his wife Yesenia. Last summer, however, he told his mother that he still thought about the sad faces of the children he had seen in Afghanistan, the children who couldn't enjoy the stable, safe life he was providing for his own family. ``When the U.S. soldiers drive by,'' he told her, ``the children will scramble like mad in the dust just to get thrown a simple pencil from us. They don't even have pencils.…”