Obama演讲词收录

freehuang

在大选的关键阶段，对手拿出秘密武器来攻击Obama，我们来看看Obama是怎么化危机为力量的。让我们来感受一下这语言中的力量：
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union...”
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street,
a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy.
Farmers and scholars, statesmen and patriots who had traveled across the ocean to escape tyranny
and persecution finally made real their Declaration of Independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed, but ultimately unfinished.
It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery,
a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate
until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years,
and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
...
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this presidential campaign:
to continue the long march of those who came before us,
a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring, and more prosperous America.
I chose to run for President at this moment in history because I believe deeply that
we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together,
unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes;
that we may not look the same and may not have come from the same place,
but we all want to move in the same direction: towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren...
Now throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary,
we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity.
Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens,
we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country.
In South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still flies,
we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.
This is not to say that race has not been an issue in this campaign.
At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.”
We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary.
The press has scoured every single exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization,
not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.
And yet, it’s only been in the last couple of weeks that
the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.
On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action;
that it’s based solely on the desire of wild and wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.
On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Jeremiah Wright,
use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide,
but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation and that rightly offend white and black alike.

freehuang

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms,
the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy, and in some cases, pain.
For some, nagging questions remain:
Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy?
Of course.
Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in the church?
Yes.
Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views?
Absolutely, just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis
with which you strongly disagree.
But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial.
They weren’t simply a religious leader’s efforts to speak out against perceived injustice.
Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country,
a view that sees white racism as endemic and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America;
a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies
like Israel instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity;
racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems:
two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis, and potentially devastating climate change
— problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.
Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals,
there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough.
Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask?
Why not join another church?
And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television sets and YouTube,
if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators,
there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.
But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man.
The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith,
a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another, to care for the sick and lift up the poor.
He is a man who served his country as a United States Marine,
and who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country,
and who over 30 years has led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth
— by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries,
and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
...

freehuang

As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me.
He strengthens my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children.
Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms
or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect.
He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad
— of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.
I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother,
a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me,
a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world,
but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street,
and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are part of me.
And they are part of America, this country that I love.
Now, some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable.
I can assure you it is not.
And I suppose the politically safe thing to do would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork.
We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue,
just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro in the aftermath of her recent statements as harboring some deep... deep-seated bias.

freehuang

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.
We would be making the same mistake that Reverend
Wright made in his offending sermons about America:
to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues
that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country
that we’ve never really worked through, a part of our union that we have not yet made perfect.
...
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools.
We still haven’t fixed them, 50 years after Brown versus Board of Education.
And the inferior education they provided, then and now,
helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.
Legalized discrimination — where blacks were prevented, often through violence,
from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners,
or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions,
or the police force, or the fire department
— meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations.
That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between blacks and whites
and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persist in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men and the shame and frustration that came from
not being able to provide for one’s family contributed to the erosion of black families,
a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened.
And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods — parks for kids to play in,
police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up, building code enforcement
— all helped create a cycle of violence, blight, and neglect that continues to haunt us.
This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up.
They came of age in the late ’50s and early ’60s, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.

freehuang

What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination,
but how many men and women overcame the odds,
how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream,
there were many who didn’t make it — those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination.
That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations
— those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons,
without hope or prospects for the future.
Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism,
continue to define their world view in fundamental ways.
For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation,
the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away,
nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.
That anger may not get expressed in public,
in front of white co-workers or white friends,
but it does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen table.
At times, that anger is exploited by politicians to gin up votes along racial lines or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

freehuang

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.
The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of that old truism
that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning.
That... That anger is not always productive.
Indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems.
It keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity within the African-American community in our own condition.
It prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change.
But the anger is real; it is powerful, and to simply wish it away,
to condemn it without understanding its roots only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
...
This is where we are right now.
It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.
And contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white,
I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle or with a single candidate,
particularly — particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
But I have asserted a firm conviction,
a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people, that, working together,
we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds and that, in fact,
we have no choice — we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.
For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past.
It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life.
But it also means binding our particular grievances,
for better health care and better schools and better jobs,
to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling,
the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.
And it means also taking full responsibility for our own lives
— by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them,
and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives,
they must never succumb to despair or cynicism.
They must always believe — They must always believe that they can write their own destiny.
...

freehuang

Now, in the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that
what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people;
that the legacy of discrimination — and current incidents of discrimination,
while less overt than in the past — that these things are real and must be addressed.
Not just with words, but with deeds — by investing in our schools and our communities;
by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system;
by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.
It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams,
that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more and nothing less than what all the world’s great religions demand:
that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us.
Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another,
and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
For we have a choice in this country.
We can accept a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism.
We can tackle race only as spectacle, as we did in the O.J. trial;
or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina; or as fodder for the nightly news.
We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel every day and talk about them from now until the election,
and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that
I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.
We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card;
or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.

freehuang

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction, and then another one, and then another one.
And nothing will change.
That is one option.
Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”
This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children
and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native-American children.
This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn;
that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem.
The children of America are not “those kids,” — they are our kids,
and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st-century economy.
Not this time.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the emergency room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care,
who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington,
but who can take them on if we do it together.
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race,
and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion,
every region, every walk of life.
This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job;
it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time... This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together,
and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag.
We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that should’ve never been authorized and should’ve never been waged.
And we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them,
and their families, and giving them the benefits that they have earned.
I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country.
This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.
And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility,
what gives me the most hope is the next generation
— the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

freehuang

下面让我们来看一篇新学期的Obama致辞，语言自有力量，这话一点不假，我不知这些小学生是否真能从他的语言中得到力量，但是我确实先被感动和激励了。还是来看看他的演讲吧：
Hello, everybody! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.
All right, everybody go ahead and have a seat. How is everybody doing today?
How about Tim Spicer?
I am here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia.
And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, from kindergarten through 12th grade.
And I am just so glad that all could join us today.
And I wanna thank Wakefield for being such an outstanding host.
Give yourselves a big round of applause.
I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school.
And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school,
it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous.
I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now with just one more year to go.
And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer
and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little bit longer this morning.
I know that feeling.

freehuang

When I was young, my family lived overseas. I lived in Indonesia for a few years.
And my mother, she didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school,
but she thought it was important for me to keep up with an American education.
So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday.
But because she had to go to work, the only time she could do it was at 4:30 in the morning.
Now, as you might imagine, I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early.
A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table.
But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and she’d say,
“This is no picnic for me either, buster.”
So I know that some of you are still adjusting to being back at school.
But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you.
I’m here because I wanna talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.
Now, I’ve given a lot of speeches about education.
And I’ve talked about responsibility a lot.