Our next president

Our next president
We're less than a year away from the first votes being cast in the 2008 presidential primaries, and the campaigns are heating up. As we speak with candidates and campaigns, we become more and more convinced that we have a historic opportunity this election season to put poverty at the top of the national agenda.

You can help do that by coming to Washington, D.C., this June for Sojourners/Call to Renewal's national mobilization, Pentecost 2007: Taking the Vision to the Streets. You'll have a front-row seat at the premier presidential campaign forum on faith, values, and poverty as leading Democratic presidential contenders -- who have indicated a strong interest in this event -- join us for a conversation about the issues that matter most to you.

Click here to learn more and register for Pentecost 2007, June 3-6, in Washington, D.C. -- where we'll take the vision to the streets : http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=action.P07&item=pentecost07_main

For more than 10 years, during the season of Pentecost, Sojourners/Call to Renewal has been convening and mobilizing church leaders, lay leaders, social service providers, and activists young and old from across the ecumenical spectrum to build a movement to overcome poverty.

Last year, at Pentecost 2006, we launched A Covenant for a New America -- a solutions-based agenda for overcoming poverty that transcends ideology. This year, with more partners than ever before, we'll take the Covenant to a new level, challenging presidential aspirants and other national leaders -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- to put poverty at the top of their agenda.

Click here to register: http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=action.P07&item=pentecost07_main

Pentecost 2007 will be just the beginning of our activities leading up to the 2008 election. Stay tuned for more information, including a similar forum for Republican presidential contenders later this year.

We're excited for what will be a major event in the presidential campaign season, and we hope you'll join us and be a part of history in the making!

-- Robin, Adam, Yonce, Kevin, Amy, Gini, Michael, Kim, and Bob
The Organizing/Policy Team at Sojourners/Call to Renewal

P.S. For information about sponsoring Pentecost 2007, click here: http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=action.P07&item=pentecost07_sponsors

The Perils of Indifference
Elie Wiesel

(excerpt)

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.

Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century's wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.

In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps -- and I'm glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance -- but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.

And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler's armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.

If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.

The full speech (text & audio) is available @ http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/wiesel.htm