Page 10 - Integrity Seminars - Special Report

President Obama said: flawless from the start, but that we have shown
the capacity to change and make life better for
I learned that change only happens when those who follow. Yes, our progress has been
ordinary people get involved and they get uneven.
engaged, and they come together to demand it. The work of democracy has always been hard.
After eight years as your President, I still believe It's always been contentious. Sometimes it's
that. And it's not just my belief. It's the beating been bloody. For every two steps forward, it often
heart of our American idea — our bold feels we take one step back. But the long sweep
experiment in self-government. It's the of America has been defined by forward motion,
conviction that we are all created equal, a constant widening of our founding creed to
endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable embrace all and not just some.
rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit
Frederick Douglass developed an analogous
of happiness. It's the insistence that these rights,
theme in The Composite Nation (supra),
while self-evident, have never been
grounded on a "common aspiration for rational
self-executing; that We, the People, through the
liberty" among all Americans:
instrument of our democracy, can form a more
perfect union. In whatever else other
What a radical idea. nations may have been
A great gift that our great and grand, our
Founders gave to greatness and grandeur
us: The freedom to Will be found in the
chase our individual faithful application of
dreams through our the principle of perfect
sweat and toil and civil equality to the
imagination, and people of all races and
the imperative of all creeds, and to men
of
to strive together, as well, to achieve a common no creeds. We are not only bound to this position
good, a greater good. by our organic structure and by our

For 240 years, our nation's call to citizenship has revolutionary antecedents, but by the genius of
given work and purpose to each new generation. our people. Gathered here, from all quarters of
It's what led patriots to choose republic over the globe by a common aspiration for rational
tyranny, pioneers to trek west, slaves to brave liberty as against caste, divine right
that makeshift railroad to freedom. It's what Governments and privileged classes, it would be
pulled immigrants and refugees across oceans unwise to be found fighting against ourselves
and the Rio Grande. It's what pushed women to and among ourselves; it would be madness to
reach for the ballot. It's what powered workers to set up any one race above another, or one
organize. It's why GIs gave their lives at Omaha religion above another, or proscribe any on
Beach and Iwo Jima, Iraq and Afghanistan. And account of race color or creed.
why men and women from Selma to Stonewall Douglass’s reference to "rational liberty" has
were prepared to give theirs, as well. deep roots in his own self-directed education,
starting at age twelve or thirteen, when he

So that's what we mean when we say America is purchased The Columbian Orator, edited by
exceptional — not that our nation has been Caleb Bingham.

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