To have your cake and eat it too…
“I believe that as hard as it will be, the change we need is coming. Because I’ve seen it. Because I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it in Illinois, when we provided health care to more children and moved more families from welfare to work. I’ve seen it in Washington, when we worked across party lines to open up government and hold lobbyists more accountable, to give better care for our veterans and keep nuclear weapons out of terrorist hands.”
“And I’ve seen it in this campaign. In the young people who voted for the first time, and in those who got involved again after a very long time. In the Republicans who never thought they’d pick up a Democratic ballot, but did. I’ve seen it in the workers who would rather cut their hours back a day than see their friends lose their jobs, in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a limb, in the good neighbors who take a stranger in when a hurricane strikes and the floodwaters rise.”
“This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that’s not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores.”
“Instead, it is that American spirit – that American promise – that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.”
-Barack Obama, Thursday, August 28, 2008, “The American Promise”
I dislike that content-free speech. Less rhetoric about the American “spirit” and “hope” and more socialist policy is necessary. America needs to be less proud of itself and more willingly to follow the lead of the democratic and more equal societies of Western Europe to start righting its problems, and the problems that the country is causing for the world at large. In fact, this is a moment in history where Americans have reason to be deeply ashamed of their failure to use their resources to create a more civil society. Any talk about an intangible “American spirit” is patriotic drivel; what if the same thing was said by the prime minister of Germany? Would that warm the humanistic heart? No. In this time of an increasingly international world in which people, business and pollution move fluidly between nations, drumming up patriotic rhetoric is wrongheaded.
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