[Vision2020] What We Stand For (Bob Schieffer)

[Tom Hansen]

>From today's (January 25, 2009) commentary by Bob Schieffer on "Face the 
Nation".

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It is an example I have cited many times over the years, that Hubert 
Humphrey once said the 1964 Civil Rights Act was America's single most 
effective foreign policy initiative. 

It had nothing to do with foreign policy, but it told the world who we 
were and what we stood for, that our system was about fairness and equal 
treatment - and that it worked. 

I thought about that when Barack Obama announced that torture would never 
be part of our national policy. 

America has always been the most successful when it is leading by example, 
when we've practiced what we've preached. 

America's weapons did not win the Cold War; they kept the Soviet Union at 
bay. The war was won when the people on the other side looked across the 
Iron Curtain, saw a better way of life there, realized their system of 
government could not give it to them, and so the walls came down. 

With a simple declaration, President Obama told the world our system of 
government is so strong we don't need to torture people to survive. That 
is the way of those who would destroy us, but that is not us. We have 
found a better way. 

That is what our message to the world must be. More importantly, that is 
what we want our children to know. When we are admired and respected by 
others, we are far more secure than any weapon can ever make us.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
"For a lapsed Lutheran born-again Buddhist pan-Humanist Universalist 
Unitarian Wiccan Agnostic like myself there's really no reason ever to go 
to work."

- Roy Zimmerman


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