War & Peace Quote by Ron Lewis

Crisis language is politics' most reliable engine: call something a "growing epidemic", frame it as a collective emergency, and you instantly justify speed, spending, and moral urgency. Ron Lewis leans hard into that formula, and the craft is in how little he actually has to specify. The sentence is built from institution names and abstractions Federal, State, local; resources; support; combat. That stack of bureaucratic nouns is doing a lot of work, signaling competence and seriousness while sidestepping the messy details that would force real commitments: what kind of epidemic, what interventions, what tradeoffs, whose behavior gets policed, whose communities get targeted, who pays.

"Must continue our fight" is the key tell. Continue implies an existing posture and an inherited consensus; fight implies an enemy you can rally against. Both soften accountability. If results lag, the problem is the epidemic's growth, not the strategy. If costs rise, they're the price of vigilance. The line also performs coalition maintenance: "many of my colleagues" suggests broad agreement, even when Congress is rarely unified on the specifics that matter.

Contextually, this kind of statement typically travels well across press releases and committee hearings because it functions as a bridge between constituencies. Law-and-order voters hear enforcement and resolve. Agencies hear budget protection and political cover. Swing voters hear "resources" rather than punitive rhetoric. The subtext is less about describing policy than about licensing it: expanding capacity, enlarging mandates, and positioning the speaker as a responsible steward of public safety without yet naming the controversial parts.