Inauguration Speech for Barack Obama

by Randy Feldman

Reprinted in honor of Martin Luther King Day, 2011.

We Americans, we citizens of the world, we must find a new way to balance the value of capital and the value of labor. We must find a way to balance the belief in an eternal and enduring principal and the necessity of being practical. We must find a way to balance our firmly held strong beliefs with the sense of compromise that comes from humility. We must find a way to respect each other and each other’s opinions, even when we are competitors and adversaries.

We have reached a new juncture in our great American journey to govern ourselves; as small “d” democrats. We must find a new and better way to carry the torch passed by Athens through Rome, rekindled in England as expressed in the Magna Carta, sent by France through the Enlightenment to Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and ultimately to us.

To borrow a line from Martin Luther King Jr., who we honored yesterday for his greatness, “I have a dream,” a dream that we find a new way to move forward with individual self-reliance, but with an understanding of the grace of our universal connectedness. By using our traditional American bravery we will put forth new ways for the government to help us help ourselves. We will also ignite a new American and international “communityism” where we become our brothers and sisters’ keepers.

The millions of people at this inauguration today are not here for me-President Obama. You are here because you have hope, that you and I together represent a new day, a brighter future, and the higher parts of our existence and aspirations instead of our fears.

The millions of people who are here and those tuning in at home, from Witchata, Kansas to Nairobi, Kenya, from Iceland to the South Pole, from China to Russia to California. You are tuned in because you too feel the breathlessness of your urgency to hope and believe.

To all of you, I have this to say: we plan to deliver. We will move America forward. We will go forthright, and hell-bent into the future with confidence and assurance because we will not be prisoner to our fears. We will embrace dissent and contradictory opinions, knowing from this conflict our best understanding of truth will follow. We will grab the wings of our aspirations and work to be uplifted.

We have been given a gift by our predecessors and ancestors. We have been given a foundation and a push. We Americans have always been brave and crazy enough to live optimistically. It is our greatest strength. There is no better time than today to let our inner beings shine through to inspire us to be more than we were yesterday, more than our mothers and fathers were in the last generation, more positive and a better force for goodness than those who came decades and centuries before. We have been taught to go forth and accomplish more than those who taught us what they knew in the hopes that we can do better. We will do the same for our children. We will not drop the torch, we will re-ignite it; we will hold the torch high.

My fellow Americans, I ask that you look at your neighbors, fellow citizens and fellow human beings as your kin, as your brothers and your sisters, as your child and parent. Challenge yourself to ask what you can do for another, not what another can do for you. For if you give of yourself, to your family member, to your neighbor, to your worker, to your boss, to your voter, to your elected representative: each will respond in kind. May that spirit be with you today, tomorrow and every day. If we give to each other it will come back to us as well. Then we will all move forward in this glorious place we call America and in the glory we call humankind.

One blade of grass. One stalk of corn. Together we are a field – a long rolling field that goes beyond what the mind and the imagination can see, and beyond the round contour of the earth that Christopher Columbus knew was not the end, but the beginning. Those in the great expansion westward in the United States knew the same. The new frontier is not to be feared but to be engaged: to be discovered, for sure, but not just to be conquered – most of all – to be improved.

Long live the people of the United States.

Long live the people of our glorious world.