Obama: Honoring Dr. King’s Legacy and Serving America

We meet at a moment when this work could not be more urgent. Today, we face challenges like never before in our lifetime. A lot of folks here in DC and across America are hurting and filled with uncertainty about what the future holds. And as I prepare to take that oath tomorrow, I know my Administration has our work cut out for us.

Lots of choice. Little freedom.

It's entirely likely that as the range of our choices has expanded in the past five decades, along with our ability to afford those choices, we have become less politically happy because our core freedoms have been undermined by a growing, rapacious state.

It was a time of almost-innocence and pioneer-Barbie-survivalist porn in the Swidinsky basement back then. But our hardship stories had an arc to them that the media have failed to give the current recession.

The Uses of Adversity

Can underprivileged outsiders have an advantage?

Today, that interpretation has been reversed. Success is seen as a matter of capitalizing on socioeconomic advantage, not compensating for disadvantage. The mechanisms of social mobility—scholarships, affirmative action, housing vouchers, Head Start—all involve attempts to convert the poor from chronic outsiders to insiders, to rescue them from what is assumed to be a hopeless state.

Great Quotes:

Only the dead have truly seen the end of war.