True dat (Read 138 times)

The absence of corrections leaves me cold.

I find that so impossibly hard to read that I can't figure out what it says, so I took the liberty of transcribing it (with a few question marks still):

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    In the evening, when Michelle and the girls have gone to bed, I sometimes walk down the hall to a room Abraham Lincoln used as his office. It contains an original copy of the Gettysburg Address, written in Lincoln’s own hand.

  I linger on these few words that have helped define our American experiment: “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

    Through the lines of weariness etched in his face, we know Lincoln grasped, perhaps more than anyone, the burdens required to give these words meaning. He knew that even a self evident truth was not self executing; that blood drawn by the lash was an affront to our ideals; that blood drawn by the sword was in painful service to those same ideals.

    He understood as well that our humble efforts(?), our individual ambitions, are ultimately not what matter; rather, it is through the accumulated toil and sacrifice of ordinary men and women – those like the soldiers who consecrated that battlefield – that this country is built(?), and freedom preserved. This quintessentially self made man, fierce in his beliefs in honest work and the striving spirit at the heart of America, believed that it falls to each generation, collectively, to share in that toil and sacrifice.

    Through cold war and world war, through industrial revolutions and technological transformations, through movements for civil rights and women’s rights and workers rights and gay rights, we have.  At times, social and economic change have strained(?) our union. But Lincoln’s words gave us confidence that whatever trials awaits us, this nation and the freedom we cherish can, and shall, prevail.

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Thanks Kevin; "strained" our union does seem to make more sense in the last paragraph . . .

 

    He knows knew that even a self evident truth was not self executive; executing;....

  

Thanks, giddy-yup, don't know how I  messed up those.

Where does ACA fit into this?

Following Lincoln, Obama is saying that he believes in a "trickle-up" theory of political change. While our political parties engage in civil war by other means, the solutions to our problems have and always will come from ordinary people doing hard work trying to make positive change. 

The problems of health will not be solved by administrative mandate, but by people on the ground working to make our own lives healthier and our own communities healthier, solving the never-ending string of problems and navigating obstacles and imperfections, listing onward faithfully and fitfully as only democracies can and should. ACA is best viewed as a spur and as a frame within which that work would take place, rather than as a silver-bullet solution to a complex and persistent problem.

In other words, he finds consolation and hope in the values of patience, persistence, and faith in the long arc of human events and reminds us that this is the attitude required for democratic politics.

 

 

  This quintessentially self made man, fierce in his beliefs in honest work and the giving(?) spirit at the heart of America, believed that it falls to each generation, collectively, to share in that toil and sacrifice.

 

Pretty sure it's "striving spirit" not "giving spirit."