On Tuesday January 10 President Barack Obama delivered his Farewell Address at the McCormick Center in Chicago, bookending his improbable ascent to the presidency in the city where it began. The speech was vintage Obama, displaying his remarkable oratorical gifts, hopeful and optimistic despite all he's had to endure, and calling us to answer our better angels while remaining committed to staying involved to make our world a better place.
There was just a bit of self-congratulation, modest compared to what the President could have said. He pointed out that "no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and carried out an operation in America during these eight years." We have "cut our dependence on foreign oil in half and doubled our production of renewables." "If, considering the economic conditions we came in on, someone had said eight years ago we would have been able to cut unemployment more than in half and have a record 75 consecutive months of positive job creation" that would have been hailed as quite an achievement. We also have "the lowest uninsured rate in history and the growth in health care cost is the lowest it's been in 50 years." These are all accurate assessments for which the Administration has every right to be justly proud.
Obama also administered "three warnings" based on his assessment that "American democracy is under assault." "We must guard against a weakening of the values that make us who we are," he said. The warnings had to do with income inequality, race relations and excessive partisanship. Growing income inequality threatens to poison society by denying upward mobility to average Americans, creating cynicism and desperation that finds expression in extremist solutions. It also feeds demagoguery that points to groups as scapegoats for lack of progress, turning Americans against one another.
He mentioned that some felt his election in 2008 meant the country had entered a "post-racial" phase, but that such a view is unrealistic. He said "I've lived long enough to be able to say that things have definitely improved in the past 30 years, but we still have work to do." In the fields of housing, criminal justice and education "hearts must change." He quoted the fictional character Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird that to understand another person you must have empathy, to be able to imagine what it's like to walk around in their skin.
Excessive partisanship was the President's third cautionary warning. Too often, he said, "we retreat into our own bubbles." He pointed out a "fragmentation, only accepting information that fits our opinions." We need and must accept "a common baseline of fact and information," that "science and reason matter," and that "without common ground compromise is impossible." He decried the "selective distortion of the facts." The entire tendency is, he summed up, "self-defeating." It is characterized by a "fear of change, fear of differences, and intolerance of free thought." Quoting George Washington from the first president's Farewell Address, Obama said "We should reject the first attempt to alienate any part of the American people from another."
He ended with an appeal to activism, saying that the system does respond to the strong voice of the people when it is loud and insistent. He called upon the young, who "do not see change as something to be feared" to spearhead a renewed drive for "a fair, just, and inclusive America." Leaving the presidency at just 55, one can well imagine Barack Obama continuing to serve as an active catalyst for the vision he has worked so hard to further over the past eight years in the White House.
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