Poverty,Heatlhcare,and restoring America

Somewhere in America, an eight-year-old girl goes to sleep hungry, a little girl who ought to be drawing pictures and learning multiplication cries herself to sleep, praying that her father, who has been out of work for two years, will get a job again. It doesn't have to be that way. Somewhere in America, a hotel housekeeper walks a picket line with her union brothers and sisters fighting for decent health care benefits during the day and works the late-shift at a diner at night so that she and her family can live a decent life and so her boy can go to college and have choices she never had. And somewhere, a young man folds a college acceptance letter and puts it in his drawer because even with his part-time job and his mother's second job, he knows he cannot afford to go. It doesn't have to be that way.

Somewhere in America, a mother wipes her hand on a dishcloth to go answer a knock on her door and opens it to find an army chaplain and an officer standing there with solemn faces and her boy's name her patriotic son who enlisted after September 11 on their lips. It doesn't have to be that way. Somewhere in the world, a five-year-old boy in a refugee camp is bending under the weight of his two-year-old sister. His family massacred, he carries his remaining sister everywhere, and sleeps with his arms wrapped tightly around her, knowing that tomorrow he will have to do the same thing, and again the next day and the day after that because she is all the family he has now. It doesn't have to be that way.

Somewhere in America, a father comes home from the second shift and feels a raging fever on the brow of his sleeping daughter as he kisses her goodnight. And now, bone-weary and worried, he cradles that child in his arms at the emergency room, because there is nowhere else for him to go. It doesn't have to be that way. And so I ask you, will you stand up for that tired father forced into emergency rooms to get health care for his little girl?

Will you stand up for the working men and women in our labor movement who have to fight for decent working conditions and living wages? We are not the country of secret surveillance and government behind closed doors. Will you stand up for the young man who knows that education is his way out of the cycle of poverty and yet it seems beyond his grasp? Will you stand up for that hungry eight-year-old girl so she doesn't give up on her life before it's even begun? Will you stand up for all the American families whose loved ones are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Silence is betrayal Will you stand up? Will you stand up for America? Because if we don't stand up, who will? If we don't speak out, who will? Speak out against the war.The time for half-measures, empty promises and sweet rhetoric is gone. Now is the time for courage, decisiveness and moral leadership.They have to hear you. Can they hear you?
Everyone must lead. It's time to stand up for the promise of America again and for the principle that every American matters. And shutting down debate in the Senate on this issue is worse than a betrayal. It's an outright denial of the people's will. Americans are speaking out. And our leaders must do no less. And make no mistake: America must lead. We are the pre-eminent, stabilizing power in the world. If we don't stand up, who will? Fight poverty, One in every five children count them, one in every five American children lives in poverty, here on the richest nation on the planet. Universal health care, end the silence So, will you speak out? Will you stand up? These are the great moral imperatives of our time. And by breaking the silence, we are not breaking faith with our flag or our forefathers or our brave young men and women in uniform. We are keeping faith with America. Let's stand up for the working people whose labor made this country great. America was built by men and women who worked with their hands. And organized labor has fought for those workers. What are you waiting for? It is time to do what you know is right and to speak out against what you know is wrong. Not tomorrow. Now! Speak out now, take action now! Everyone matters Will you stand up for America? Because if we don't stand up, who will? If we don't speak out, who will? It doesn't have to be that way, For the richest country in the world to allow this to be happening is one of the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen.