¡Students for Kucinich!: Humanity Helping Humanity:

Humanity Helping Humanity:

Posted by Josef at 9:15 PM

Creating a Culture of Compassion

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
-- the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963.

This Fall 2007 semester, while you are experiencing anxiety before an exam, nineteen of your fellow Americans will be experiencing anxiety before an execution, as they wait on Death Row. Think that Quantitative Methods of Calculus is torture? In this same semester, 340 detainees sit in their cells on American soil at Guantanamo Bay, living their lives at risk of enduring cruel forms of punishment… and real torture. And although you might be fine with skipping breakfast on your morning rush to class, millions of American schoolchildren have also skipped their breakfast—and last night’s dinner too, since they live in extreme poverty and hunger due to frighteningly high levels of economic disparity in our country.

It’s time that humanity begins helping humanity, and that time is right now.

As a member of Congress, Dennis Kucinich introduced the Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act of 2003 to establish an end to capital punishment. There is no reason that our government should be killing its own citizens—especially when there have been well-documented cases of innocent people being found on Death Row. Life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is the best alternative to government-sponsored executions.

When Eleanor Roosevelt helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations in 1948, she stressed Article 5, which states, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” This concept is not new. Our founding fathers even wrote in Amendment 8 of our Constitution’s Bill of Rights that “…cruel and unusual punishments [shall not] be inflicted.” So why is our country still committing cruel acts of punishment in the form of torture? We consider ourselves to be an advanced civilization, yet torture is the most barbaric a society can get. Torture should never be an option.

Economic disparity has sharply increased, with the poor finding themselves trapped in their socioeconomic class. Balconies of expensive high-rise condominiums in our country’s major urban centers often overlook dilapidated housing projects just blocks away. Our healthy “organic” foods have become costly luxury items even though they are cheaper to produce than the genetically modified and preservative-loaded foods that are the only affordable option of the working poor. There shouldn’t be such a contrast between the “haves” and “have-nots”—for us to be a just society, both “haves” must be able to come together and form a more equal whole.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich has plans to help create this “culture of compassion” in American society… and it begins with your pledge to send him to the White House in 2008.

XO,
Josef