Leadership Quote by Jan Schakowsky

Schakowsky’s line is built to disarm the easiest excuse in politics: helplessness. She starts by conceding what no serious person can deny - that much of life is governed by forces beyond legislation. Earthquakes, droughts, conflict: the big, grim nouns that make government look small. That opening isn’t defeatist; it’s a credibility play. By admitting limits, she earns permission to demand action where limits don’t apply.

The pivot comes on a single hinge word: "but". Once nature and geopolitics are framed as ungovernable, poverty is reframed as knowable. "When we know where..". turns suffering into a matter of information and proximity, not fate. The subtext is pointed: in a country that can map storms and track markets in real time, widespread hunger and homelessness aren’t mysterious tragedies - they’re political choices, or at minimum political priorities.

Her list of "the hungry, the homeless and the sick" is classic social-democratic triage: basic needs, housing, health. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the tendency to treat each as a separate, boutique issue. She bundles them to imply a single moral category: preventable suffering.

Context matters. As a progressive Democrat associated with expanding the social safety net, Schakowsky is speaking into recurring American skepticism about government competence and responsibility. The rhetoric anticipates the retort - “you can’t fix everything” - and answers it with a narrower, sharper claim: you don’t have to fix everything to be obligated to fix what you can.