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"ALL WE ARE SAYING IS"-
SHIRLEY CHISHOLM

For more than eight years, the American people have sat by helplessly, while two administrations huddled in special crisis centers in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon, poring over maps, selecting new targets to destroy, glossing over atrocities, racking their brains to think up such phrases as "protective reaction" strikes and "vietnamization" and moving troops in and out of first South Vietnam, then Cambodia, then Laos. For most of the 60's and the first two-and-a-half years of the 70's, the American government has been engrossed in answering such questions as: "What weapons can be employed here? How many bombs and napalm should be dropped there? How can we get our casualties off the front pages? How much more time can we buy with this speech? Hoe long with the public tolerate news of widespread heroin addition among our troops? Is the public dutifully impressed with the latest body counts? How can we cover up the tiger cages; the swarm of refugees; the black market in Saigon; the murder and assassination program of operation Phoenix; the prostitution; the deforestation and physical destruction of vast areas of Vietnamese countryside; My Lai; the Pentagon Papers; the embarrassing claims of victory by ambassadors and generals year after year?"

In the name of God, I ask, what conceivable gain can be worth all this? Is there no end to this insanity? This grotesque absorption in war and all its offshoots has virtually destroyed the ability of our government to function effectively at home, and to respond to the process of change and evolution which our society is undergoing today. One weeps before the fact of floundering administrations rendered impotent by way, the puppet of forces over which they have lost all control, while the nation is plagued by problems growing worse-huge areas of rotten, rat-infested housing in noisy, decaying cities; health care so expensive it is hopelessly beyond the reach of millions of Americans; the deluge of shabby, contaminated and worthless junk in the economic marketplace; the millions of able-bodied men and women, particularly the nation's youth, unable to 

An address delivered by the Honorable Shirley Chisholm, Congresswoman from New York, at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C., April 20, 1972.

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"ALL WE ARE SAYING IS"-   CHISHOLM

find work; the continued exclusion of Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Indians, women, and young people from productive participation in our social, political, and economic life; a counter-productive and violent system of law-enforcement and punishment; the continuing fouling of the air, of our lakes and rivers and streams; the power of giant, untouchable corporations; soaring prices for the bare necessities of life; and an educational system so appalling that teachers around the country have virtually given up on teaching their students, while the students themselves often leave school hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the aforementioned problems of the nation.

One trembles with rage to think of all these urgent problems, any one of which by itself is critical, begging the attention of government which was consistently responded only with lies and deceit and the monstrous ongoing sacrifice of America's young men and the taxpayer's dollar. The record of this nation's leadership in Washington regarding Vietnam constitutes a wretched betrayal of the just expectations and needs of the American people.

The fact that we have now rushed more jets, bombers, helicopters and battleships to Vietnam, that we now have seven aircraft carriers stationed off its shores, and the fact that more B52 bombers than ever before are bombing Hanoi and Haiphong once again, brings us back full circle to 1970, two years ago, when the Nixon-Agnew administration first widened the war by extending it to Cambodia and Laos. These two were also supposed to "shorten the war," but they did not stop the North Vietnamese from launching their biggest offensive of the way.

I submit that it is no longer a question, as some maintain of a gradual withdrawal to save this nation for an orgy of guilt and witch-hunts and a consequent return to isolation. The integrity of any American commitment to its allies is in no more danger of being corrupted by getting out of Vietnam at this late date than I am of being tanned by a warm sun.

This vile tragedy continues in Indochina because this Administration if now trapped by its own overweening self-obsession, self-delusion, and its moral and intellectual property into an endless, violent and blundering search for a settlement on its own ludicrously unrealistic terms.

More young Americans are to be made sacrificial lambs, to join the 55,000 already dead and the 400 prisoners of war. More Indochinese are dying, to join their one to two million dead. More expensive American equipment is rushed over and flung unto the breach

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