An Alternative Inaugural Address - 'Maybe It's The Time of Man”
By Michael Monasky | January 21, 2013 | Critics fear that President Obama's second inauguration speech will fail to inspire us....
https://www.elkgrovenews.net/2013/01/an-alternative-inaugural-address-maybe.html
By Michael Monasky | January 21, 2013 |
Critics
fear that President Obama's second inauguration speech will fail to inspire us.
Here is my attempt to avert that failure with a substitute message, albeit
brief: my own inaugural address.
Forty-four
years ago Joni Mitchell penned “we are billion year old carbon”, and that
“we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.” It was the anthem of
Woodstock. More than a music festival, it was a manifesto of the World War II
baby-boom generation that “dreamed” it “saw the bombers riding shotgun in the
sky...turning into butterflies above our nation.”
Although
the cold January mornings correlate with poor employment prospects for tens of
millions of Americans, it's not just the time of year. It is a time of man. It
is a time of sage elders and frailty. It
is a time of women and celebration of child-rearing shadow-work. It is a time
of care-free, curious children. It is a time of people of color, intense poverty,
accumulated disadvantage, inheritance of debt. It is a time of billionaires,
corporate personhood, and concentration of wealth. It is a time of severe
austerity. It is the time of man described by percentages: one, forty-seven,
and ninety-nine.
The temporal
tide ebbs and flows with the life and death of each generation. Though there is
little of either, time yields hope, the political password of the last two
elections. The work ethic, an unchallenged moral, drives folks to get by and
try to have some happiness.
What is the
American dream? Is it moral? Is it hopeful? Does it lead to happiness? Is it
worth fighting for? How do we belong and what unites us? How are we any
different from any people in any other part of the world?
Suburban
sprawl dictates our distances, our alienation between each other, our work, and
ourselves. Forefathers declared independence founded upon inalienable rights
easily undone by the persistent entropy of political economy. There is no right
to food, clothing, shelter, clean air, water, education, health care
resources...it's a dog-eat-dog world out there and in the states of America,
united or not.
As our
investments have proven, the world is a dangerous place. The US has military
installations in every country it recognizes. The recent violence in Mali and
Algeria highlights our nation's interests in oil and gas reserves in that
region, which have ensnared France and Britain.
US Postal
Service-sponsored bicyclist/athlete Lance Armstrong recently admitted to Oprah
Winfrey, “This story was so perfect for so long.” Executives from Enron, AIG,
Bear Stearns, Bank of America, and Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff made the same
claim.
Global
climate change trumps these human iniquities. High tides and rising shorelines
afflict low-lying lands in the seven seas. Acidification of sea water by carbon
dioxide discharge from man-made emissions erodes the living coral in the
planet's barrier reefs.
This is a
time of man. Man must sing to the song scored by his biology. Man is the only
iterative animal and must think out his
thoughts. Eleanor Roosevelt presided over the 1948 drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
that has spawned many councils arguing for and struggling to elevate human
dignity. Mankind ignores women’s wisdom at its own peril.
Inauguration
Day, 2013, coincides with the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. African American
infant mortality rates are twice those of the rest of the population. African
American kids in Chicago suffer a 50% high school graduation failure rate. A
sniper assassinated King 43 years ago in Memphis, 1968. But people still
dreamed, hoped, and worked towards fulfillment of the promises in protecting
human rights.
This is a
time for an unfolding and expansion of human potential, of humane treatment of
all human beings. Dreaming, imagining, hoping, working, and caring for Mother
Nature and respect for each other are our tasks, to be responsible for
promoting human rights in this time of man.
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