[Dialogue] Re A great political summary

[Janice & Abe Ulangca]

Thanks, Ed, for sending the commencement speech given by Ted Sorenson.  What especially struck me?  The 5 paragraphs below.  What still holds my loyalty to ICA?  The work of many who are determined not to be indifferent.
Janice

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Excerpts from Ted Sorensen's Remarks
New School University Commencement
May 21, 2004

... Last week, a family friend of an accused American guard in Iraq recited 
the atrocities inflicted by our enemies on Americans, and asked: "Must 
we be held to a different standard?" My answer is YES. Not only because 
others expect it. WE must hold ourselves to a different standard. Not 
only because God demands it, but because it serves our security.

Our greatest strength has long been not merely our military might but 
our moral authority. Our surest protection against assault from abroad 
has been not all our guards, gates and guns or even our two oceans, but 
our essential goodness as a people. Our richest asset has been not our 
material wealth but our values.

We were world leaders once ­ helping found the United Nations, the 
Marshall Plan, NATO, and programs like Food for Peace, international 
human rights and international environmental standards. The world 
admired not only the bravery of our Marine Corps but also the idealism 
of our Peace Corps....

Paradoxically, the charges against us in the court of world opinion are 
contradictory. We are deemed by many to be dangerously aggressive, a 
threat to world peace. You may regard that as ridiculously unwarranted, 
no matter how often international surveys show that attitude to be 
spreading. But remember the old axiom: "No matter how good you feel, if 
four friends tell you you're drunk, you better lie down."

Yet we are also charged not so much with intervention as indifference ­ 
indifference toward the suffering of millions of our fellow inhabitants 
of this planet who do not enjoy the freedom, the opportunity, the 
health and wealth and security that we enjoy; indifference to the 
countless deaths of children and other civilians in unnecessary wars, 
countless because we usually do not bother to count them; indifference 
to the centuries of humiliation endured previously in silence by the 
Arab and Islamic worlds...


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Abe & Janice Ulangca
3413 Stratford Drive
Vestal, NY  13850
607-797-4595
aulangca at stny.rr.com
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