This article is adapted from a speech given at the Catholic Youth Convention in El Paso, Texas, last October 24. It was entered in the April 21 Congressional Record by Sen. George S. McGovern (D.S.D.).

I'm really glad to be here today. Back home it's cold and probably raining... Boston's a lot different from El Paso. The architecture is different, the way people talk is different, the whole pace of life is different. But there are a lot of things that unite El Paso and Boston; Texas and Massachusetts and the Southwest and the Northeast. We're both part of one nation, a nation that's in trouble.

We've just come out of a war that did no good for anybody. It killed more people than a mind can imagine, over 40,000 of them Americans. Even those that defended it then can find no joy in its memory now.

It has not, as you know, been a stable year for any of us. And with good reason. In Boston as in El Paso, 4% of the population has $60,000 per year while the other 96% cling tenuously to whatever modest, constantly shrinking income they can manage. One-third of the country is at the poverty line or below. Another one-half, more than one-half, is made up of people who are doing the work that makes this the country is called the richest in the world. And yet who could say that, that many are appreciated with an appropriate and just due?

They are working in factories, in stores and offices. They are planting our crops and harvesting them. They are teaching our children carrying our mail, driving our trucks. They are running our railroads, bottling our beer, paving our roads. They are keeping the rhythm of this country going.

In return for this, many of them live in fear of joblessness. In return for this, salaries, for some once reasonably adequate, are becoming less and less and less so by inflation, a "public enemy" no one seems able to shoot down. In return for this, an American working family can be destroyed, penalized for years by the sickness of one of its members: a child becomes ill and the parents have to face thousands of dollars worth of medical expense, when at best they can meet the cost of their groceries. What can the consequences be? Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

For do we provide justice for our own? We write tax laws which permit these conditions to exist, which invite their persistence. It's not only a matter of taxes being levied relatively heavily on working people-though it is hard. But the rich can jump through loopholes like trained acrobats, a businessman can go to the plushest restaurant in El Paso with a friend and after three courses and two drinks apiece write the whole thing off as tax deductible. Well that's great for him, his friend and the Alka-Seltzer people.

But when an ordinary working man takes time off from his job to take his child to a clinic for medical treatment, and decides to have lunch with that child in a cafeteria, there is no free lunch, and no tax deduction. All there is, is several hours of lost pay and a bill for the treatment.

The Declaration of Independence states that as far as America is concerned, all men are created equal. Well we may all be created equal, but something seems to happen a little while after that when we find out our economic status. Today many of the more privileged youth of this country, think only of consolidating their next eggs while millions of other young people worry about whether they'll find a job. Lincoln said that this nation could not endure permanently half slave and half free, and that goes for the economically enslaved in America today as well. This nation must endure, and it is our duty, the young people's duty, to see that it does.

Among many young people in Appalachia, among Indian youth, Blacks and Spanish speaking youth the unemployment statistics are grim. Unemployment among all young people ranges from 30%-50% in America today as the young men and women of this country are faced with the near certainly of joblessness, or at best intermittent jobs, often of the most marginal kind. What has happened to the youthful idealism of the 1960's? My father noted in 1967 that: "Not since the founding of the Republic-when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at 32, Henry Knox built the artillery corps at 26, Alexander Hamilton joined the independence fight at 19, and Rutiedge and Lynch signed the Declaration of South Carolina at 27-has there been a younger generation of Americans brighter, better educated, more highly motivated than this one. In the Peace Corps, in the Northern Student Movement, in Appalacia, on dusty roads in Mississippi, and narrow trails in the Andes, this generation of young people has shown an idealism and a devotion to country matched in few nations and excelled in none."

Where is that idealism now? In recent years we have been told not to worry about others but to secure ourselves, feather our own caps in whatever way we can. True, some politicians talk about sacrifice-but what we call sacrifice are efforts to win a war or beat inflation. Where are the sacrifices we must make so that there can be some justice in the lives of those who have never known it?

We find on the government level, our greatest welfare recipients are great industries which receive millions and more millions of dollars of support, and yet-if unemployed workers and their children are given some aid, and if some of us urge medical insurance for all Americans then one hears about the evils of government spending and talk of Socialism.

One hears that we must maintain a huge and powerful military in order to defend the free world. I agree. I only wonder about the company we keep in this free world. Does it include Franco? President Park of South Korea? President Thieu? The military junta in Chile? Or Brazil? Does it include the recent military leaders of Greece to whom we gave millions of dollars in military aid?

Money can be the greatest gift or the most terrible weapon in this society. The money that we gave to support these governments could have helped feed and school hungry children here at home and in other countries. It might have gone to inadequately staffed and supplied hospitals and schools or to those parts of the country where people receive virtually no medical care at all.

There is something tragic, in the truest sense of the word, about our sense of what is important, about what really matters.