Shalom My Gantseh Megillah Family and Friends,


In the past few years, politicians have written many books. Hillary Clinton, when she was First Lady, wrote a book titled It Takes a Village, explaining her belief that a community is responsible for the way children are brought up. This week, Senator Rick Santorum, Republican senator from Pennsylvania, released his book with the title It Takes a Family. The Senator’s thesis is that individual families, not the community, mold the lives of our children.

I won’t promote or disparage either side of this ongoing argument. I am ultimately concerned with the hypocrisy of our politicians who choose to pontificate rather than act. We are constantly barraged with accusations of how we are being dragged down a path of immorality. Right-wing Christian fundamentalist values have been so deeply entrenched into the dialogue that both parties have made them synonymous with Americanism.

While these self-promoting moralists are literally laying down the law, millions of families are living in abject poverty. Their children go without decent health care and their schools are crumbling. While the disadvantaged continue to eke out an existence on our tough, mean streets, the do nothing politicians concern themselves with all the wrong issues. Do they take any steps towards ensuring all citizens have the right to adequate health care, decent food, and a good education? No! They just continue to moralize about the evils of same-sex marriage, birth control, a woman’s right to choose, burning flags and whether to prosecute the runaway bride. None of these priorities go anywhere near the life and death issues that face so many of our citizens.

It is old news that we live in the richest and most advanced society in the world. But that alone means absolutely nothing. When we cannot care for our poorest and neediest among us; when we cannot properly feed and educate our children; when we cannot provide health care to all of our citizens, we become weak and regressive. Showing our military might in a country far away from us, while we let our own countrymen starve does not show strength, but a horrible weakness in our soul, and a lack of true spirituality in our intentions.

I couldn’t care less whether it takes a village or a family to bring up a child; not when we have an entire country that cannot take care of its own.