#51
Posted: 7/24/08 at 5:06pm
Joan Walsh writes about it in Salon.com:
I know Republicans are going to try to use the cheering Berlin crowds against him, but Barack Obama made it very hard for them today. At first I was distracted by the echo in the enormous public plaza, and a little concerned about the screaming adulation of the crowd, but eventually I succumbed to the moment. To see the American flags in the crowd, and all those rapt, happy faces, was surprisingly moving to me. Even for American liberals, there must be a psychic toll to watching George W. Bush skulk around foreign capitals, where crowds, if they massed at all, would likely be heckling him.
The best lines of Obama's speech, not surprisingly, echoed the heart of his 2004 Boston convention speech: a call for global unity, after so much division and hatred. Having hailed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Obama told the crowd: "The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down."
And as someone who has occasionally felt uncomfortable with Obama's references to "our time" or to the specialness of his "movement" -- I've never liked "we are the ones we've been waiting for" -- I felt entirely different when he ran down the list of global problems to be solved, and then told the crowd: "People of Berlin -- people of the world -- this is our moment. This is our time." It is indeed all of our time, time to get the hell to work.
Whole story here
I know Republicans are going to try to use the cheering Berlin crowds against him, but Barack Obama made it very hard for them today. At first I was distracted by the echo in the enormous public plaza, and a little concerned about the screaming adulation of the crowd, but eventually I succumbed to the moment. To see the American flags in the crowd, and all those rapt, happy faces, was surprisingly moving to me. Even for American liberals, there must be a psychic toll to watching George W. Bush skulk around foreign capitals, where crowds, if they massed at all, would likely be heckling him.
The best lines of Obama's speech, not surprisingly, echoed the heart of his 2004 Boston convention speech: a call for global unity, after so much division and hatred. Having hailed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Obama told the crowd: "The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down."
And as someone who has occasionally felt uncomfortable with Obama's references to "our time" or to the specialness of his "movement" -- I've never liked "we are the ones we've been waiting for" -- I felt entirely different when he ran down the list of global problems to be solved, and then told the crowd: "People of Berlin -- people of the world -- this is our moment. This is our time." It is indeed all of our time, time to get the hell to work.
Whole story here
"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
~ Muhammad Ali
Updated On: 7/24/08 at 05:06 PM
