Politics & Power Quote by Charles Rangel

Rangel’s line is less a kumbaya call than a tactical reframing of what “national security” is allowed to mean. Spoken in an era when terrorism dominated budgets, headlines, and political oxygen, it insists that the country’s moral attention span shouldn’t be hijacked by a single threat, no matter how spectacular. The key move is the phrase “not only”: he grants the premise of the post-attack security consensus, then quietly expands the battlefield.

The intent is coalition-building with an edge. By pairing terrorism with “economic justice,” AIDS, and “vestiges of discriminatory policies,” Rangel treats domestic suffering as a slow-motion emergency worthy of wartime urgency. The subtext is accusatory but controlled: if we can mobilize trillions, reorganize agencies, and accept sweeping state power to stop terror, then failure to address poverty, public health, and discrimination isn’t about capacity - it’s about priorities and whose pain counts.

His list is also carefully constructed. “Defeat of the AIDS epidemic” evokes a crisis that was long stigmatized and underfunded, especially in Black and poor communities; “vestiges” nods to structural racism without triggering the defensive backlash that more blunt language can provoke. “Policies of all kinds” broadens the target, signaling that discrimination isn’t a relic but an adaptable system.

Rhetorically, it’s an attempt to deny leaders the escape hatch of single-issue heroism. Fight terror, yes - but don’t use it as political cover to postpone justice. The line works because it weaponizes patriotic commitment against selective compassion.