Now, my friend is not particularly sympathetic towards the less fortunate, so I explained it in a more practical manner. "If a kid at TJ doesn't get a good education because of where he's born or who his parents are, then that's one less employee that I could hire, one less person who can be a doctor or lawyer and serve the community, one less person that can then provide for their famliy, and it's one more person who's likely to be stuck in a dead end job or get into a life of crime and drugs." He agreed then that it is very important that everyone in society be taken care of.
With that as a context, I think about the kids my age who are serving in Iraq right now, many because they have few other options to pay for their education. There are certainly plenty like Jimmy Webb who are serving out of a sense of obligation and pride who could be elsewhere. But too many are there because they have little else to turn to. I know three people serving in Iraq right now, two that I knew in elementary school and one from high school serving as a military journalist. The correlation between income and service is not an accident.
This is a disturbing trend that started in Vietnam, where our leaders essentially said, "Those in college are too important to risk on the battlefield, so we'll take the underprivileged instead." Any war worth fighting is worth being fought by all of society. Even if you don't call for a draft, then call on the nation to do what they can at home to support the war effort. Instead, we have for the first time in history a President who has cut taxes in the midst of a war. The privileged get tax cuts, while the underclass sends their sons and daughters to war. That is flat out wrong.
Like most of you, my initial interest in Jim Webb was his foreign policy experience. After listening to his message and hearing his commentary on the class structure in our society, I knew this was a guy who really gets it and is far more than the single issue candidate the Republicans would like him to be. As he said, "If we had more people in Congress whose sons and daughters were going to places like Iraq, we'd have a very diffent foreign policy in this country." We desperatley need someone in office who understands what life is like from that perspective and will for granted the sacrifice that many my age are making right now in Iraq.
To me, Jim Webb's candiacy is appealing for three reasons. First, he'll help re-orient our foreign policy and stop playing politics with national security. Second, he'll take very seriously the breakdown of our society along class lines and work to remedy it. Finally, he'll have respect for our soldiers by introducing an expanded GI Bill of Rights (which Allen's refusal to do is reason enough to vote against him) and never needlessly risking their lives.
In closing, 2,974 is the latest count of American military deaths in Iraq. As a symbolic gesture towards the incredible sacrifice that they have made, let's send a man to Washington who will care for everyone in Iraq as if they were his own son, because he knows what those parents are going through. You can not put a price on the sacrifice those in Iraq have made, but I suggest a symbolic donation of $29.74 to the Webb campaign. It is a small amount to recognize the wrong that has been done in Iraq and all the families that didn't get to have their loved ones come home. Let us all pray that we don't have one more life lost because our leaders don't value their sacrifice.