Faith & Spirit Quote by Ed Asner

Ed Asner’s line lands like a weary dispatch from the celebrity-activist front: not a call to patriotism, but a plea that assumes the worst and still insists on effort. He starts with a grim concession - “probably be too late to save Iraq” - that does two things at once. It signals moral urgency without naive optimism, and it shifts the frame from geopolitics to accountability. Iraq, in this telling, isn’t just a distant theater; it’s the first visible casualty of a larger domestic failure.

The real target is embedded in the pivot: “trying to save our democracy.” Asner’s subtext is that the war isn’t merely an overreach abroad, it’s a stress test at home - for truth-telling, checks and balances, dissent, and the public’s ability to resist being managed by fear. Calling the council’s action “immeasurably strong” is a deliberate paradox: he’s talking about a body that may be procedurally limited and temporally late, yet still capable of symbolic force. In civic life, symbolism isn’t decoration; it’s leverage.

Context matters: Asner was one of the more outspoken Hollywood opponents of the Iraq War era, when “support the troops” rhetoric often doubled as a muzzle on criticism. His prayer isn’t religious so much as rhetorical - a way to claim humility while issuing an indictment. The sentence’s rough, breathless construction mirrors the moment it comes from: hurried, frustrated, conscious that history is moving faster than institutions, and terrified that the collateral damage includes the public’s faith in democracy itself.