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Yeah, so, I've been meaning to post this for a while, but sadly couldn't find the speech for a long time.
"For the last couple of months, Senator Rumson has suggested that being president of this country was, to a certain extent, about character and although I have not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I've been here three years and three days, and I can tell you without hesitation: Being President of this country is entirely about character.
For the record: Yes, I am a card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U. But the more important question is why aren't you, Bob? This is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the questions.
Why would a senator, his party's most powerful spokesman and a candidate for president, choose to reject upholding the Constitution? If you can answer that question, then, folks, you're smarter than I am, because I didn't understand it until a couple of minutes ago. Everybody knows American isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship.
You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating, at the top of his lungs, that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free, then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest." Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free. I've known Bob Rumson for years. I've been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn't get it. Well, I was wrong.
Bob's problem isn't that he doesn't get it. Bob's problem is that he can't sell it. Nobody has ever won an election by talking about what I was just talking about.
This is a country made up of people with hard jobs that they're terrified of losing. The roots of freedom are of little or no interest to them at the moment. We are a nation afraid to go out at night. We're a society that has assigned low priority to education and has looked the other way while our public schools have been decimated. We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious men to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, friend, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: Making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.
You gather a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family and American values and personal character. Then you have an old photo of the President's girlfriend. You scream about patriotism and you tell them she's to blame for their lot in life, you go on television and you call her a whore. Sydney Ellen Wade has done nothing to you, Bob. She has done nothing but put herself through law school, prosecute criminals for five years, represent the interests of public school teachers for two years, and lobby for the safety of our natural resources.
You want a character debate? Fine, but you better stick with me, 'cause Sydney Ellen Wade is way out of your league. I've loved two women in my life. I lost one to cancer, and I lost the other 'cause I was so busy keeping my job I forgot to do my job. Well that ends right now."
- Michael Douglas, "The American President"
America is advanced citizenship - so is every other citizenship in the world. Being a citizen, with all that requires, is hard, and we don't want hard. We want easy, we want to be able to go to the store and buy a DVD without having to worry about armed bandits in the streets.
We don't have to. We've delegated that responsibility to others, and thankfully in this country, those people take those responsibilities seriously.
But run that through your mind again. We have the ability to not worry about every detail in the world, because we have organised our country to take care of some of the decisions for us.
What does that say in the situation that the government is not representing us, is not saving us from bandits in the streets?
That's when America's problems become harder, but you can't look back to the way you were protected from fear when you were a child and believe that you are still a child. If you're fifty years old and you weren't afraid during the Cuban Missile Crisis, then your parents did you a disservice by refusing to admit that there were things to fear even as life went on as usual.
I don't think that fear should rule anyone's life. I think, in fact, that letting fear rule has gotten the Man In The Oval Office where he is today. I think that we need to live despite fear, and we need to know that there was never an easier time to go back to, one that we cannot create with legislation or anything else. We cannot create a time when people didn't have to work at the process of living - although we've done a good job of creating that now, between television, prescription drugs, and the various things that we use to insulate ourselves from the world. We cannot create a safer time to live because there is no safer time in the past.
Nor is there one in the future. As people speak about making life safer, they fail to address the problems that we do have. I don't see any terrorists on my daily rounds.
I don't see crack dealers outside the schools, either, but I'd be far more willing to believe that people want to sell drugs to children than that someone's going to come along and attack us again. I don't see any evidence that we give much of a shit about the environment. I don't see any evidence that we're willing to work harder to make things like public transit workable, or that we're going to take recycling beyond the bare minimum, or that we're going to move our food sources closer to our residences.
Yet we're only dealing with terrorists.
And badly, too.
If life is about hard choices - and make no mistake, it is, it's about being shy in social situations, it's about being depressed occasionally, it's about monitoring your childrens' diet so they're not bouncing off the walls - all we're doing is removing life from our existence. The more we insulate ourselves and the more we seek to live in a safer time, the less we focus on what's happening now.
And what's happening now, in so many ways and at so many levels, is appalling. Rather than pretending that the problems we have don't exist, or that the only problems we have are the ones least likely to exist, let's start thinking about this in terms of life being better for us and for our descendents, as our life now is easier than the life that was had by our grandparents.
Let's stop measuring success in terms of how many conveniences we have. It's just material and medical crap and it's meaningless.
"For the last couple of months, Senator Rumson has suggested that being president of this country was, to a certain extent, about character and although I have not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I've been here three years and three days, and I can tell you without hesitation: Being President of this country is entirely about character.
For the record: Yes, I am a card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U. But the more important question is why aren't you, Bob? This is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the questions.
Why would a senator, his party's most powerful spokesman and a candidate for president, choose to reject upholding the Constitution? If you can answer that question, then, folks, you're smarter than I am, because I didn't understand it until a couple of minutes ago. Everybody knows American isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship.
You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating, at the top of his lungs, that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free, then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest." Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free. I've known Bob Rumson for years. I've been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn't get it. Well, I was wrong.
Bob's problem isn't that he doesn't get it. Bob's problem is that he can't sell it. Nobody has ever won an election by talking about what I was just talking about.
This is a country made up of people with hard jobs that they're terrified of losing. The roots of freedom are of little or no interest to them at the moment. We are a nation afraid to go out at night. We're a society that has assigned low priority to education and has looked the other way while our public schools have been decimated. We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious men to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, friend, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: Making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.
You gather a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family and American values and personal character. Then you have an old photo of the President's girlfriend. You scream about patriotism and you tell them she's to blame for their lot in life, you go on television and you call her a whore. Sydney Ellen Wade has done nothing to you, Bob. She has done nothing but put herself through law school, prosecute criminals for five years, represent the interests of public school teachers for two years, and lobby for the safety of our natural resources.
You want a character debate? Fine, but you better stick with me, 'cause Sydney Ellen Wade is way out of your league. I've loved two women in my life. I lost one to cancer, and I lost the other 'cause I was so busy keeping my job I forgot to do my job. Well that ends right now."
- Michael Douglas, "The American President"
America is advanced citizenship - so is every other citizenship in the world. Being a citizen, with all that requires, is hard, and we don't want hard. We want easy, we want to be able to go to the store and buy a DVD without having to worry about armed bandits in the streets.
We don't have to. We've delegated that responsibility to others, and thankfully in this country, those people take those responsibilities seriously.
But run that through your mind again. We have the ability to not worry about every detail in the world, because we have organised our country to take care of some of the decisions for us.
What does that say in the situation that the government is not representing us, is not saving us from bandits in the streets?
That's when America's problems become harder, but you can't look back to the way you were protected from fear when you were a child and believe that you are still a child. If you're fifty years old and you weren't afraid during the Cuban Missile Crisis, then your parents did you a disservice by refusing to admit that there were things to fear even as life went on as usual.
I don't think that fear should rule anyone's life. I think, in fact, that letting fear rule has gotten the Man In The Oval Office where he is today. I think that we need to live despite fear, and we need to know that there was never an easier time to go back to, one that we cannot create with legislation or anything else. We cannot create a time when people didn't have to work at the process of living - although we've done a good job of creating that now, between television, prescription drugs, and the various things that we use to insulate ourselves from the world. We cannot create a safer time to live because there is no safer time in the past.
Nor is there one in the future. As people speak about making life safer, they fail to address the problems that we do have. I don't see any terrorists on my daily rounds.
I don't see crack dealers outside the schools, either, but I'd be far more willing to believe that people want to sell drugs to children than that someone's going to come along and attack us again. I don't see any evidence that we give much of a shit about the environment. I don't see any evidence that we're willing to work harder to make things like public transit workable, or that we're going to take recycling beyond the bare minimum, or that we're going to move our food sources closer to our residences.
Yet we're only dealing with terrorists.
And badly, too.
If life is about hard choices - and make no mistake, it is, it's about being shy in social situations, it's about being depressed occasionally, it's about monitoring your childrens' diet so they're not bouncing off the walls - all we're doing is removing life from our existence. The more we insulate ourselves and the more we seek to live in a safer time, the less we focus on what's happening now.
And what's happening now, in so many ways and at so many levels, is appalling. Rather than pretending that the problems we have don't exist, or that the only problems we have are the ones least likely to exist, let's start thinking about this in terms of life being better for us and for our descendents, as our life now is easier than the life that was had by our grandparents.
Let's stop measuring success in terms of how many conveniences we have. It's just material and medical crap and it's meaningless.
