A Cruel Mistress

I saw this editorial cartoon today and thought I'd share it. I know people are getting what some call "war fatigue." A lot of us are just tired of hearing about it. But sometimes we need to be reminded of why it matters, not just in terms of foreign policy, but in the way it consumes national resources and attention.

Ben Sargent
Friday, Nov. 9, 2007

"There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I 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. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything 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 adventures like 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." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Beyond Vietnam, April 4, 1967

~Geoffrey Dobbins
Vice President, UCABJ