Al Gore's Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009

[babylonsister]

OK, I think it's fantasy myself and Gore isn't running, but it'd be nice if someone thought this way and could articulate that thought.



Al Gore's Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009
by David Michael Green | Oct 19 2007


Fellow Americans, and Fellow Citizens of Our Shared Earth -

More than two hundred years ago, the shores upon which we stand were blessed to provide home to an unusual outcropping of men and women who contained within themselves remarkable quantities of wisdom, energy and courage. These are qualities that are alone rare in anyone, and spectacular when combined.

They did the impossible - not once or even twice - but at least three times in their lives. They imagined a better way to live - free and equal - in ways we take for granted today but were altogether foreign in their time. A mere cognitive act, one might say of this first heroic turn, but given their context in the middle of the eighteenth century a nevertheless powerful and brave thing that we can only begin to appreciate, and one which was a predicate for all to follow.

They did the impossible again, when they assembled a rag-tag scrabble of an army under an inexperienced commanding general and proceeded to defeat the world's greatest military power of the time in a long and arduous struggle against guns, weather, poverty and demoralization, for the prize of freedom and the opportunity to start anew.

And still they were not finished for, having won the war, they also won the peace by concocting a remarkable piece of governmental engineering that remains to this day our society's foundational contract, the Constitution of the United States.

This exceptional generation of thinkers and doers were leading lights in arguably the most important social movement of human history - the aptly named Enlightenment - which rescued humanity from the chains of irrationality, prejudice and immaturity, and called upon us instead to think for ourselves, to trust our observations and our analyses, and to share a spirit of discovery and honesty that has opened fantastic doors of well-being for succeeding generations in every domain of our experience as human beings.

We Americans were fortunate indeed to have these Founders as the creators of our society, for rarely do a collection of people possessing such a remarkable combination of attributes ever come together in one place and one time, to such a remarkable effect.

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[Newsjock]

1. K&R

And not just because it's as long and polysyllabic as the real Mr. Gore would write. :)