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.
U.S. Senator Barack Obama at Knox College
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This piece speaks not only of Barama’s facility with ideas and language, but also of the great liberal arts tradition of these small midwestern colleges. It must have been a great speech.
“Because individual salvation has always depended on collective salvation.”
No no. Individual salvation has always depended on thinking less of the self and more of others — but never the actual salvation of the collective. And egads, but what terrible post-communist word choice! Either I am seeing a red star rising or perhaps a borg… (though I am always very impressed with his elocution even if I don’t always agree with the words…)