In the Sunday Dallas Morning News, not known as a bastion of liberal thinking, there is a full page devoted to the commencement address Barack Obama gave at Knox College.
Accompanying it is an article by David Kusnet which was also published in The New Republic Online, www.tnr.com.
Basically, he says that Obama has the right stuff. He writes about the way to speak so that people can hear what is being said.
“And then America happened.
A place where destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against all odds, they could form “a more perfect union” on this new frontier.”
This is the kind of rhetoric that is needed to send the selfish and greedy to their spider holes. The full text is available at http://www.knox.edu/x9803.xml. Sorry, I don’t know how to embed the link on this site.
A little more of the speech as a tip jar.
“The true test of the American ideal is whether we’re able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them. Whether chance of birth or circumstance decides life’s big winners and losers, or whether we build a community where, at the very least, everyone has a chance to work hard, get ahead, and reach their dreams.
We have faced this choice before.”
I can’t wait until he grows into his words. Such a potential guiding light for this country, unless of course it is all talk and no “Stand.” I’m rooting for him!
And it was great. Here’s the part that stuck with me:
“Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. You need to take up the challenges that we face as a nation and make them your own. Not because you have a debt to those who helped you get here, although you do have that debt. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate than you, although I do think you do have that obligation. It’s primarily because you have an obligation to yourself. Because individual salvation has always depended on collective salvation. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.”