President Obama urged the reform of education, healthcare and energy in his weekly address on the Fourth of July.
Americans’ indomitable spirit is what led the first citizens to found the United States; that same spirit is what must push us forward now, he said.
“These are some of the challenges that our generation has been called to meet. And yet, there are those who would have us try what has already failed; who would defend the status quo.
They argue that our health care system is fine the way it is and that a clean energy economy can wait. They say we are trying to do too much, that we are moving too quickly, and that we all ought to just take a deep breath and scale back our goals.
These naysayers have short memories. They forget that we, as a people, did not get here by standing pat in a time of change. We did not get here by doing what was easy. That is not how a cluster of 13 colonies became the United States of America.”
Every July 4 we celebrate our independence from the British as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. We fire up the grill, sprawl on the beach, dig out the rolled up flag from its hiding spot in the garage.
But do we remember what it means to be an American? Thanks to Framers and to subsequent defenders of justice, we have a unique constitution and 27 liberty-preserving amendments.
“We’re facing an array of challenges on a scale unseen in our time,” Obama said in his address, citing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, dependence on foreign oil, the economic recession, and the healthcare and education systems.
You have a voice; exercise your First Amendment right to free speech.
What issue do you think is most important? What change would you like to see?