Beyond Vietnam/Iraq

Via Democrats.org "TGIF Open Thread"...

Heads up! You can catch Governor Dean on CNN's The Situation Room today at 5:15 p.m. and on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews at 5:30 p.m.

At last night's anti-escalation vigil, I ran into Rev. Tim Ahrens, who is the founder of the We Believe Ohio group. He spoke on camera to reporters, although I haven't found that online yet. He also said a few words to the vigil attendees as we were attempting (unsuccessfully for the most part) to keep our candles lit. He spoke of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech at Riverside Church in 1964

Ahrens said that in that speech, King expressed regret for his own ten years of silence on the Vietnam War. He was particulary concerned about the connection between the protracted war in Iraq and poverty...

There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both black and white - through the Poverty Program. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political play thing of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

You can read the rest here. What Tim Ahrens said last night is that we don't want to be ten years into the Iraq war and regretting our silence, so we need to make sure we are speaking out now.

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