Spencer Cox: “I think all of us here in this chamber and, in fact, anyone in the world with a television set watched in awe and horror…”

“I think all of us here in this chamber and, in fact, anyone in the world with a television set watched in awe and horror and ultimately relief as 6 year-old boy whose faint cries were heard beneath the rubble was extracted alive after several days following the earthquake. His first words were: Why am I here, and where is my family? But his parents and his sisters were all killed in that same building in that same earthquake. It tore my heart out. Mr. Speaker, I have a 6 year-old son, and just to imagine the human loss, the tragedy of that earthquake, is almost beyond our individual capacities. Sometimes it takes an enormous tragedy such as this earthquake to bring home how futile it is for us to maintain the political differences that we do across the globe. I think everyone watching on television saw that the people of Taiwan are not the dangerous splitists so often derided by the Communist government in Beijing, but men and women and children fighting for a better life, just like all of us. Mr. Speaker, that is why it is so tragically ironic that at this time, when we should have set aside politics and put humanitarian interests first, the government of Beijing literally got in the way as Russian aid was trying to make its way immediately after the tragedy to the victims.”