Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, as you mentioned, the Poor People's Campaign was a national call for a moral revival. What we are doing here now: We are reengaging the Poor People's Campaign for the nonviolent economic reform movement that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was organizing when he was assassinated in 1968. This resurgence is being called the most extensive wave of nonviolent direct action in our Nation's history. What this resurgence recognizes is that Dr. King was right, that the trifecta of racism, poverty, and militarism are interconnected. Today they are trapping more than 140 million Americans in poverty and low wealth, and many of them are children and veterans. Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk to you about one of Dr. King's triple evils, militarism. I want to talk about it because we have a total volunteer Army now. We don't have the draft. So the young people who are being recruited into our military today are young people, often from low-income households, who are seeking an opportunity, and they are being seduced into the military with promises of technical training, bonuses, and college. I would like to share with you a letter from one of those people, Mr. Brock McIntosh of Illinois. He says: This way of injecting the poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people, normally humane, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. I would like to tell you all about the precise moment I realized that there was poison in me.…”