Obama

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Back with some random observations

I haven’t posted for a while for a number of reasons.  The two major reasons are first, I have been spending a lot of time on the computer at work and didn’t want to come home and do the same (rather watch the Red Sox) and, second, because the health care debate was beginning to depress me.  I’ve been kicked into starting to post again by what happened over the weekend  on the golf course in Lakeville, MA.

In case you haven’t heard the news, a swastika and Obama were carved into the 18th green.  This picture is from the Boston Globe.

lakeville_swastika_101309.jpg

President Obama is coming to Boston in a couple of weeks to support Deval Patrick.  The FBI, Secret Service, and Lakeville police are investigating.  The Globe reports

Lou Mincone, the public club’s assistant manager, said he was stunned by the vandals’ gall, and baffled by the senseless, hateful act.

“What would motivate anyone to do such a thing?” he asked incredulously. “To use the president’s name like that? It’s crazy.”

Mincone, who discovered the damage, said the vandals dug the message more than an inch into the turf, likely using a tool or sports cleats. He said the message, which was about 10 feet by 15 feet wide, was written sometime Sunday night or Monday morning

It took a while to do,” he said. “It wasn’t a five-minute deal.”

This is what the climate surrounding the election of a black man to be President has brought.  The tea baggers with the posters of the President as Hitler, the Rush Limbaugh’s, the Glenn Becks, and the Michelle Bachman’s.  I have been jolted out of my hiatus.

The Red Sox are all done.  And likely done is Jason Veritek.  We need to sign Jason Bay, figure out what ails Josh Beckett, hope Matsuzaka stays thin and strong over the winter, and that Papi finds his mojo.  Go Phillies!

The Senate Finance Committee compromised away real health care reform to court the insurance companies and the Republicans.  So the night before the vote the insurance companies issue a report that they will have to raise rates anyway and only Olympia Snowe voted for the bill.  To show what an Alice in Wonderland world this this, the President thought this was progress.  At this point he probably thinks, well, let’s pass something and fix it later which is the point I am rapidly reaching.

The insurance company report was issued by a group called America’s Health Insurance Plans.  According to the story in the New York Times

“The overall impact will be to increase the cost of private insurance coverage for individuals, families and businesses above what these costs would be in the absence of reform,” said Karen M. Ignagni, president of the trade association.

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The report says that the cost of the average family coverage, now $12,300, will rise to $18,400 in 2016 under current law and to $21,300 if the Senate bill is adopted. Likewise, it said, the cost of individual coverage, now $4,600, will average $6,900 in 2016 under current law and $7,900 under the bill.

The study provides ammunition to Republicans attacking the legislation and might intensify the concerns of some Democrats who worry that the bill does not provide enough help to low- and middle-income people to enable them to buy insurance.

Scott Mulhauser, a spokesman for Democrats on the Finance Committee, said: “This report is untrue, disingenuous and bought and paid for by the same health insurance companies that have been gouging consumers for too long. Now that health care reform grows ever closer, these health insurers are breaking out the same tired playbook of deception. It’s a health insurance company hatchet job.”

I am becoming increasingly convinced that nothing can get done in this country because everyone is too worried about the effect on their profits.  Regulation of the finance industry, health care reform, tort reform.  In every instance those opposed worry about their own bottom line.  What ever happened to the idea of the common good?

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The Madisons and Paul Jennings

James and Dolley Madison owned slaves.  One of those slaves, Paul Jennings, actually wrote a recently rediscoved memoir.  His story appeared in the New York Times.

In 1809, a young boy from a wealthy Virginia estate stepped into President James Madison’s White House and caught the first glimpse of his new home. The East Room was unfinished, he recalled years later in a memoir. Pennsylvania Avenue was unpaved and “always in an awful condition from either mud or dust,” he recounted.

“The city was a dreary place,” he continued.

His name was Paul Jennings, and he was an unlikely chronicler of the Madison presidency. When he first walked into the Executive Mansion, he was a 10-year-old slave.

But over the course of his long life, Mr. Jennings witnessed, and perhaps participated in, the rescue of George Washington’s portrait from the White House during the War of 1812 and stood by the former president’s side at his deathbed. He bought his freedom, helped to organize a daring (and unsuccessful) slave escape and became the first person to put his White House recollections into a memoir.

I grew up in Philadelphia and learned from an early age the story of Dolley Madison, the young Quaker girl who married out of the Meeting, but married a President.  I was taught that she became very worldly.  (I think this was a cautionary tale told to young Friends.) Later, living in Virginia and visiting Montpelier, it was brought home to me that she and James had owned slaves.  What I didn’t know was that she allegedly treated her slaves, including Mr. Jennings, very poorly, refusing to free him after the President’s death.

…In March 1848, the Liberator newspaper published a letter charging that Mrs. Madison had hired out Mr. Jennings to others and then kept “the last red cent” of his pay, “leaving him to get his clothes by presents, night work, or as he might.”The letter also said Mrs. Madison had refused to free Mr. Jennings, as her husband had wished. Instead, she sold him to an insurance agent, who in turn sold him to Senator Daniel Webster for $120. (He promptly set Mr. Jennings free and let him work off the debt as a servant in his household.)

Mr. Jenning left a 19 page memoir of life with the Madisons and at the White House.

In the 19-page memoir, Mr. Jennings, who served as a footman and later a valet to President Madison, recalled the chaotic escape from the White House hours before the British burned the building in 1814.

He described President Madison as a frugal and temperate man who owned only one suit, socialized with Thomas Jefferson and was so careful with his liquor that he probably never “drank a quart of brandy in his whole life.”

Mr. Jennings said he often served and shaved the president and recalled that his master was kind to his slaves. He was 48 when he finally bought his freedom, years after Madison’s death in 1836.

As a free man, Mr. Jennings worked in the government’s pension office, bought property and even helped support the former first lady Dolley Madison with “small sums from my own pocket” when she fell on hard times.

Mr. Jennings’ decendents will visit the White House together next week.  The visit will bring together the family of a slave who worked there in the house built by slaves and now occupied by by the first African American President.  How remarkable and wonderful is that?

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Where are the Republican Ideas?

The Democrats have large majorities in the House and Senate.  The President is a Democrat.  I believe the majority of governors are also now Democrats.  And being Democrats, they are bickering among themselves about the details of things they all agree need to be done.  It seems to me this would be a perfect opportunity for the Republicans to offer a substantial plan on, say health care.  Instead, we have the birther movement.  Newsweek has published the President’t birthcertificate to celebrate his birthday.

But the birthers are sure this is fake.

Back to health care.  Congress is back home this month and holding town meetings.  Instead of offering alternative and maybe asking some reasonable questions, the Republican strategy is to scream and disrupt these meetings.  In fairness to them, this is not a tactic they invented (as much as Dick Armey’s lobbying firm might want to think they did).  Chris Hayes  in his blog in the Nation looks at the situation this way

I’m on a team in American politics: I’m proudly, vigorously on the left. So there’s no need to bend over backwards to be formally consistent. That said, intellectual honesty requires one to separate out one’s formal objections from substantive ones and I’ve been given pause by the remarks of some right-wing activists like Jon Henke. He and others have been saying: wait a sec, when the left shows up and makes noise somewhere it’s activism, but when the right does it it’s thuggery and mob rule?

So after discussing the issue on Maddow last night, I’ve been asking myself, aside from the deep substantive opposition I have to the tea-baggers’ ideological agenda (and the insane hypocrisy of people on Medicare screaming about the dangers of government-run health care), what, exactly, my beef is?

I don’t think there’s anything “wrong” with the tactics of those people who, with the facilitation of large monied interests, are organizing and shouting down their opponents at town hall meetings. But one thing should be clear: these are the tactics of a small, motivated, enraged and engaged minority. The footage of recent town hall scrums remind me, actually, of ACT-UP actions back in NYC when I was growing up. ACT-UP, the AIDS and gay rights group that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, was impassioned and angry and used dramatic confrontational action to great public effect. They were a vanguard. They were a small, tightly coordinated impassioned minority. And they were fundamentally on the right side of history.

What frustrates me, however, is that no one in the press confused ACT-UP with broader public opinion. No pundits said “the public is clearly feeling rising unease about government inaction on AIDS, as evidenced by the latest ACT-UP protest.” Why? Because they were gay, and they had AIDS and they didn’t look like “average citizens” or “heartland” voters.

At their root, the town hall protests are a very similar phenomenon. I think these people, unlike ACT-UP, are wrong. Deeply wrong. (They’re also not literally fighting for their lives because of a homophobic and indifferent government, but that’s neither here nor there). But they’re a small, tightly coordinated, enraged minority. They want to scream and fuss, it’s a free country, as they say.

The problem is the overwhelming instinct on the part of pundits and the MSM to look, and see old white men in overalls and Legionnaire hats and think they are watching someone give voice to the sentiments of broad swaths of the electorate. And it’s just not true. What we’re seeing at these events are the voices of radicals, extremists and zealots.

Harold Myerson writing in the Washington Post points out that the protesters are overwhemingly not people of color.

Last weekend, right-wing Republicans stormed a number of such meetings across the country, shouting down members of the House and, in Philadelphia, Sen. Arlen Specter and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. In Austin, protesters blocked Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett’s car and made it impossible for him to talk to constituents about such matters as appointments to military academies.

What’s particularly curious about these two protests is that they took place on very liberal turf — Philadelphia and Austin — yet the local liberals and people of color seemed absent. Philadelphia is a heavily African American city, yet one strains to see any blacks among the protesters on the YouTube clips. The activists who have been whipped into a frenzy, and who have dominated the recess meetings so far, appear to be conservative whites.

The question, as Meyerson goes on to ask, is why aren’t people of color, the young folks who worked for Obama, the progressives and the liberals turning out for the town hall meetings?   Meyerson again

When future historians look back at this passage in our nation’s history, I suspect they’ll conclude that this Obama-isn’t-American nuttiness refracted the insecurities and, in some cases, the hatred that a portion of conservative white America felt about having a black president and about the transformation of what many thought of as their white nation into a genuinely multiracial republic. But whatever the reasons, a mobilized minority is making a very plausible play to thwart a demobilized majority.

So we have a black President that one whole segment of the population (77% of Americans think he is a citizen but only 42% of Republicans think he is)  thinks is not really not President trying to reverse the slide into economic inequality and to promote racial equality at the same time.  This is a time when we should be having great debates about ideas not screaming at each other about where the President was born.

A genuine debate about ideas would help create better legislation and make the Democrats sharpen their ideas.  Maybe it would get those of us who support health care reform out to town hall meetings to talk about ideas.  But, unfortunately, the Republican party seems to be out of ideas.

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Beer, Politics and Race

I ‘m going with Eric Asimov  from the New York Times on this one.  Today in his blog “The Pour” he wrote

I’ll tell you what I would have done if I were President Obama. First of all, I wouldn’t give anybody a choice. I’d throw political symbolism out the door. Then, I’d import a keg of Guinness Stout directly from Dublin, because the kegs from Ireland are simply superior to anything out of a bottle or can. Then I’d import a Dublin publican to serve the Guinness because drawing a proper pint is an art that requires vast experience.

Then, I’d sit ’em down at a bar (because I’d bring in the actual pub – this is the White House, it can do anything). “Gates, you, over there. Crowley, you, here. Sit. Publican, draw us some pints!’’

And as that smooth, deep, dark stout begins to pour forth, and the publican perhaps tells a few stories in his rich Irish brogue, a feeling of calm brotherhood settles over the room. You cannot fight over the first Guinness. Add in 10 more pints and a rugby match and you’ve got a riot. But a pint of Guinness in a Dublin bar at the White House? Skip? Jim? I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

In the end, the two of them will be doing ads for Guinness.

A possible site of the gathering between President Obama, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Sgt. James Crowley.

No, Gates and Crowley won’t be doing Guinness ads but I see a PBS special on racial profiling in their future.  Crowley is, as evidenced by his press conference after the event, is an articulate guy.

And what I really want to know if why no one offered to take Professor Gates’ and Sergeant Crowley’s jackets.  It is July in Washington.

By the way, I had a Harp – out of the bottle.

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Doing the Beer Run

Yesterday, amid all the release of the 911 tape, the radio chatter, and the arrest report (which appeared to show that the arrest report may not have been 100% accurate) came the big news :  The profiler, the profiled and the President will be having a beer and a chat at the White House on Thursday night.  I think this is an excellent thing and maybe some greater good will come out of it, if not for the country as a whole, but  for the City of Cambridge.  Perhaps Mayor Simmons can get Crowley and Gates to lead the public forum she is planning.

And according to Robert Gibbs’ discussion with a reporter at his briefing yesterday, he and the reporter will be doing the beer run.  This exchange reported in Politico.com

The planned reunion was the subject of light-hearted banter at Gibbs’ briefing on Monday:

Q: Okay. And another subject, Officer Crowley is drinking Blue Moon, we hear Professor Gates is drinking Red Stripe or Becks — what’s the President drinking?

 MR. GIBBS: The President had a Budweiser at the All-Star Game, so — why are you looking at me like that? That’s what he drank.

 Q: We’re talking Blue Moon, Red Stripe, Becks —

 MR. GIBBS: What’s wrong with Budweiser? Why do you hate Budweiser? (Laughter.)

 Q: Well, he could get —

 MR. GIBBS: Why do you hate Budweiser, Wendell? (Laughter.) Wendell, how about this — how about you and I, we’ll go pick out the beer, we’ll do the beer run. Uh-oh, hold, please. (Laughter.)

 Q: I’m happy to do that.

All joking aside, I think this is an important meeting and, as someone, maybe the President himself, said a teachable moment.

I’ll be having either a Harp or a Red Stripe.

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Lessons from the Sotomayor Hearings

Over the weekend two very interesting pieces appeared.  One was Frank Rich’s column  in the New York Times, the other Melissa Harris Lacewell in the Nation.  Both approach the subject of Senatorial attitude toward a Latina woman.  One writer is a middle aged white male and former New York Times theater critic, the other a young, African American professor at Princeton. 

Here is Rich

Yet the Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-régime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent.

The hearings were pure “Alice in Wonderland.” Reality was turned upside down. Southern senators who relate every question to race, ethnicity and gender just assumed that their unreconstructed obsessions are America’s and that the country would find them riveting. Instead the country yawned. The Sotomayor questioners also assumed a Hispanic woman, simply for being a Hispanic woman, could be portrayed as The Other and patronized like a greenhorn unfamiliar with How We Do Things Around Here. The senators seemed to have no idea they were describing themselves when they tried to caricature Sotomayor as an overemotional, biased ideologue.

And here Harris-Lacewell

The hearing was a performance of a broader set of social rules that govern race and gender interactions in American politics. Women, and most especially black and brown women, have to prove their fitness for public life by demonstrating the ability to endure harsh brutality without openly fighting back. The ability to bear up under public degradation is a test of worth. America’s favorite black woman heroine is Rosa Parks, a woman who is remembered as silently enduring the humiliation of being ejected from a public bus for refusing to comply with segregated seating.

Sotomayor passed the test. She met the Senators’ questioning with thoughtful responses. Her voice did not quiver. Her face did not scowl. Many women of all races feel inspired by her. But I wonder about this lesson that continues to teach women that we can only have space in the public realm as long as we control all emotion.

They are both describing what Harris-Lacewell calls “the politics of public humiliation.”  The practice of this kind of politics in the year 2009 says more about the Republicans than about Sotomayor – or the current status of women of color.

Rich ties the Republicans to the Class of  1994, the Class of the Contract with America, the Newt Gingrich class.

That the class of ’94 failed on almost every count is a matter of history, no matter how hard it has retroactively tried to blame its disastrous record on George W. Bush. Its incompetence may even have been greater than its world-class hypocrisy. Its only memorable achievements were to shut down the government in a fit of pique and to impeach Bill Clinton in a tsunami of moral outrage.

…

…Today the G.O.P.’s token black is its party chairman, Michael Steele, who last week unveiled his latest strategy for recruiting minority voters. “My plan is to say, ‘Y’all come!’ ” he explained, adding “I got the fried chicken and potato salad!”Among Sotomayor’s questioners, both Coburn and Lindsey Graham are class of ’94. They — along with Jeff Sessions, a former Alabama attorney general best known for his unsuccessful prosecutions of civil rights activists — set the Republicans’ tone last week. In one of his many cringe-inducing moments, Graham suggested to Sotomayor that she had “a temperament problem” and advised that “maybe these hearings are a time for self-reflection.” That’s the crux of the ’94 spirit, even more than its constant, whiny refrain of white victimization: Hold others to a standard that you would not think of enforcing on yourself or your peers. Self-reflection may be mandatory for Sotomayor, but it certainly isn’t for Graham.

Harris-Lacewell puts it this way

All Supreme Court nominees endure tough, ideologically driven questioning. It’s as true for white male conservative justices as for Sotomayor. But this public display took on different meaning as white men repeatedly asserted that Sotomayor was capable of making legal judgments based only on her personal experience and ethnic identity.

I was proud of Sotomayor’s restraint, but I also wanted her to counter attack, to punch back, to show anger. She couldn’t do so in part because she is bound by the rules of judicial decorum. She also couldn’t do so because of the racialized, gender rules of political engagement that allow white men, from senators to firemen, to express outrage, indignation, and emotion, but disallow those same expressions from women of color.

So what have we learned?  We have learned that maybe Lacewell-Harris is right when she compares Sonia Sotomayor to Little Rock Nine student, Elizabeth Eckford.

One of the most enduring images of the Civil Rights Movement is of Elizabeth Eckford. She is being harassed and taunted by a group of white students, parents, and police on her way to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. On that morning Eckford missed connecting with the eight other African American students of the Little Rock Nine and their NAACP leader, Daisy Bates. Eckford was alone when the angry crowd surrounded and confronted her

Only now the mob is the composed of white, mostly southern, Republican Senators.

We have learned that women, regardless of race, regardless of how successful they may be,  still have to behave differently than men, that there is still a double standard.

We have learned, again, that the Republican Party is mostly clueless when it comes to race.  And I believe that their fear and dislike of Barack Obama will drive most of their behavior over the next eight years.

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Barack and Jacoby

The Social Security Administration has released their list of baby names for last year.  Not surprisingly, Barack  is becoming a popular name.

Jumping more than 10,000 spots — from number 12,535 in 2007 to 2,409 in 2008 — it’s by no means one of the top titles for tykes. But 2009 could see an even bigger spike, perhaps putting the name in the top 1,000 for next year.

Barack Obama

Kinda like when a bunch of baby boomers were named Dwight, after the President and General Eisenhower.  But it does change the perception of the name, Barack, when there are a lot more of them running around and lots of people know a child with the name.  I used to be unique with the name Maya until Maya Angelou gained a lot of recognition.  I had a very brief encounter with her in 1977 when we both remarked how interesting it was to meet another Maya.  Now Maya’s are all over the place.

And then there is the growing popularity of Jacoby.

Though Jacob was the top name for boys, its variation, Jacoby, jumped 200 spots to number 423, drawing inspiration, no doubt, from Red Sox rookie centerfielder Jacoby Ellsbury. Perhaps these kids will be stealing bases like number 46 when they start T-ball.
Jacoby Ellsbury

I should also note that for some reason Emma was the top girl’s name with Olivia holding steadyand Miley moving up.

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Mr. Robinson Wins the Pulitzer

Washington Post editor and columnist, Eugene Robinson, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for his columns about the 2008 election. 

One of his best was A Special Brand of Patriotism from July 4, 2008.  It begins

Anyone who took U.S. history in high school ought to know that one of the five men killed in the Boston Massacre, the atrocity that helped ignite the American Revolution, was a runaway slave named Crispus Attucks. The question the history books rarely consider is: Why?

Think about it for a moment. For well over a century, British colonists in North America had practiced a particularly cruel brand of slavery, a system of bondage intended not just to exploit the labor of Africans but to crush their spirit as well. Backs were whipped and broken, families systematically separated, traditions erased, ancient languages silenced. Yet a black man — to many, nothing more than a piece of property — chose to stand and die with the patriots of Boston.

Barack Obama had been criticized for failure to wear a flag lapel pin.

It is not common, in my experience, for sitting U.S. senators to be questioned on their love of country — to be grilled about a flag pin, for example, or critiqued on the posture they assume when the national anthem is played. For an American who attains such high office, patriotism is generally assumed.

It seems that some people don’t want to give Obama the benefit of that assumption, however, and I have to wonder whether that’s because he’s black. And then I have to wonder why.

Three Tuskegee Airmen -- from left, Charles McGee of Bethesda, Howard Baugh of Petersburg, Va., and Roscoe Brown Jr. of New York City -- stand for the national anthem at a memorial ceremony in Grapevine, Tex., in 2007.

What’s unpatriotic is pretending that the past never happened. What’s unpatriotic is failing to acknowledge that we’ve struggled with race for nearly 400 years. What’s unpatriotic is relegating “black history” to the month of February when, really, it’s American history, without which this nation could never be what it is today.

My father, Harold I. Robinson, served in the Army during World War II and has lived to witness this transformative moment of possibility. My father-in-law, the late Edward R. Collins, was a sailor who saw action in the South Pacific; he rests at Arlington National Cemetery. I have no patience with anyone who thinks that patriots don’t have brown skin.

Congratulations, Mr. Robinson.

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Pondering the Year of the Ox

There was an interesting op-ed in today’s Boston Globe about Niu which is the Chinese for Ox.  The writers invoke the spririt of niu as the spirit of President Obama.

Niu has been an important labor force on Chinese farms for thousands of years. Therefore, in Chinese culture, niu is often used to symbolize a hardworking and trustworthy spirit. There is a famous saying in Chinese – “Although niu only eats grass, it produces milk” – which praises niu’s willingness to contribute. In addition, a poem by the 20th-century Chinese writer Lu Xun brings home niu’s attitude of serving without complaining: “To a thousand pointing fingers I defy with fierce brows, and to younglings I’d be fain to bow and serve as a niu.” Niu’s qualities – no-complaints, trustworthiness, unselfishness, and willingness to give and serve the people – are exactly the spirit that we should pursue in a time of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear amid the crisis.

That spirit must inhabit us all. As President Obama said in his inaugural address, there is a demand to return to the truth – the values upon which America’s success depends – including honesty, hard work, courage, and fair play.

The one thing I don’t really understand is the writers seem to be using “ox” and “bull” to refer to the same animal.  In English “bull” refers to a male and would never give milk no matter how much grass he ate.  But that quibble aside, they have a point.  They conclude

In Chinese, crisis (wei ji) means crisis (wei) and opportunities (ji). The crisis may open up an opportunity for the world’s largest developed country and largest developing country to address global challenges instead of triggering a crisis in bilateral relations. Obama has the choice to turn a crisis into an opportunity – if he leads in the spirit of niu and works with world leaders to turn the year of the ox into the year of the bull.

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Obama’s Speech

John Nichols has just posted his reaction to the speech in the Nation

Through much of his speech, Obama sounded a little like an emergency-room surgeon turning away from the operating table to explain what he had done and what he was about to do.

Yes, the patient is very sick, “But,” the physician-in-chief counseled, “while our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken; though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”

On the other hand, Bobby Jindal’s debut on the national political stage did not compare at all to Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic Convention.  He needs to work on his delivery and also to make sure he is reacting to what the President actually said.

John Nichol’s take?

If Obama said “stimulate,” Jindal said “wait.”

If Obama said “invest,” Jindal said “cut taxes.”

If Obama said “Roosevelt,” Jindal said “Reagan.”

One of the great lies in American politics is the claim that responses to presidential addresses are never of any consequence. In fact, they invariably tell us what how serious a fight the president has on his hands.

The selection of Jindal was telling, indeed.

On Tuesday night, Barack Obama offered a comprehensive “yes, we can” promise.

Bobby Jindal responded with a narrow “no, we can’t” threat.

The battlelines could not be any more clearly drawn.

The choice could not be any more dramatic — or vital to the nation’s future.

While Jindal fretted Hoover-like about the new Democratic president’s “irresponsible” response to an old Republican crisis, Obama took the nothing-to-fear-but-fear itself position, telling Americans that, “The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation. The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach. What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more.”