66gardeners
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.“One of the things you’ve learned over the last four years is there’s no longer any room for excuses,” US President Barack Obama told 500 male graduating students at Atlanta's Moorehouse College, in a rare speech on what he sees as the obligations that young black men have to themselves, their families and their communities.
“We’ve got no time for excuses – not because the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they haven’t,” he said. “It’s not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; that’s still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with a billion young people from China and India and Brazil entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned.” And, he said, while being black may sometimes pose obstacles, “whatever hardships you may experience because of your race … pale in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured – and overcame. Still, the president said, “too few of our brothers and sisters have the opportunities you’ve had here at Morehouse.” In neighborhoods not far from his home in Chicago or just a few miles from Morehouse’s campuses, “too where too many of our men spend their youth not behind a desk in a classroom, but hanging out on the streets or brooding” in jail.
It’s the responsibility of the graduates, Obama said, to “be a good role model and set a good example for that young brother coming up.” Even for those graduates who arrived at Morehouse “from communities where life was about keeping your head down and looking out for yourself” and now hope to make money and move on, there’s an imperative to give back. “It betrays a poverty of ambition if all you think about is what goods you can buy instead of what good you can do,” he said, suggesting that those who go on to become lawyers “find time to defend the powerless” or that those who go into business consider “what broader purpose your business might serve, in putting people to work, or transforming a neighborhood.”
While much of Obama’s speech focused on the public lives he hopes the graduates lead, he also spoke of the importance of being a responsible husband and father. “Keep setting an example for what it means to be a man,” he said. “Be the best husband to your wife, or boyfriend to your partner, or father to your children that you can be. Because nothing is more important.” Pointing to his own legacy, Obama said it is his family that will matter most. “I know that when I’m on my deathbed someday, I won’t be thinking about any particular legislation I passed, or policy I promoted; I won’t be thinking about the speech I gave, or the Nobel Prize I received,” he said. “I’ll be thinking about a walk I took with my daughters. A lazy afternoon with my wife. Whether I did right by all of them.”
Though Obama urged the graduates not to make "excuses" in their lives, he acknowledged that he once did. “We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices,” he said. “And I have to say, growing up, I made quite a few myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing.
Obama to black grads: 'No longer any room for excuses' - POLITICO.com
No wonder his approval rating is so high. There is no malice in that man. I salute you sir.
“We’ve got no time for excuses – not because the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they haven’t,” he said. “It’s not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; that’s still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with a billion young people from China and India and Brazil entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned.” And, he said, while being black may sometimes pose obstacles, “whatever hardships you may experience because of your race … pale in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured – and overcame. Still, the president said, “too few of our brothers and sisters have the opportunities you’ve had here at Morehouse.” In neighborhoods not far from his home in Chicago or just a few miles from Morehouse’s campuses, “too where too many of our men spend their youth not behind a desk in a classroom, but hanging out on the streets or brooding” in jail.
It’s the responsibility of the graduates, Obama said, to “be a good role model and set a good example for that young brother coming up.” Even for those graduates who arrived at Morehouse “from communities where life was about keeping your head down and looking out for yourself” and now hope to make money and move on, there’s an imperative to give back. “It betrays a poverty of ambition if all you think about is what goods you can buy instead of what good you can do,” he said, suggesting that those who go on to become lawyers “find time to defend the powerless” or that those who go into business consider “what broader purpose your business might serve, in putting people to work, or transforming a neighborhood.”
While much of Obama’s speech focused on the public lives he hopes the graduates lead, he also spoke of the importance of being a responsible husband and father. “Keep setting an example for what it means to be a man,” he said. “Be the best husband to your wife, or boyfriend to your partner, or father to your children that you can be. Because nothing is more important.” Pointing to his own legacy, Obama said it is his family that will matter most. “I know that when I’m on my deathbed someday, I won’t be thinking about any particular legislation I passed, or policy I promoted; I won’t be thinking about the speech I gave, or the Nobel Prize I received,” he said. “I’ll be thinking about a walk I took with my daughters. A lazy afternoon with my wife. Whether I did right by all of them.”
Though Obama urged the graduates not to make "excuses" in their lives, he acknowledged that he once did. “We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices,” he said. “And I have to say, growing up, I made quite a few myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing.
Obama to black grads: 'No longer any room for excuses' - POLITICO.com
No wonder his approval rating is so high. There is no malice in that man. I salute you sir.
