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美国前总统奥巴马卸任后一直保持低调，最近首度再次出现在公众视野，他当天参加芝加哥大学的论坛，面向年轻人发表离职后的首次公开演讲。
Former President Obama’s First Public Speech
Since Leaving Office
University of Chicago
April , 2017
Hey! How’s going? Hello, everybody. Please, everybody have a seat.
Everybody have a seat. Have a seat. So what’s been going on while I’ve been
gone? I…
It is wonderful to be home. It is wonderful to be at the University of
Chicago. It is wonderful to be on the south side of Chicago. And it is wonderful
to be with these young people here. And what I want to do is just maybe speak
very briefly at the top about why we’re here and then I want to spend most of
the time that we’re together hearing from these remarkable young people who are,
I think, representative of some amazing young people who are in the audience as
well.
I was telling these guys that it was a little over 30 years ago that I came
to Chicago. I was 25 years old. And I had gotten out of college filled with
idealism and absolutely certain that somehow I was going to change the world.
But I had no idea how or where or what I was going to be doing. And so I worked
first to pay off some student loans. And then I went to work at the City
Colleges of New York on their Harlem campus with some student organizing.
And then there were a group of churches out on the south side who had come
together to try to deal with the steel plants that had closed in the area and
the economic devastation that had been taking place, but also the racial
tensions and turnover that was happening in these communities. So they formed an
organization, they hired me as what was called a community organizer. And I did
not really know what that meant or how to do it. But I accepted the job.
And for the next three years, I lived right here at Hyde Park, but I worked
for these communities like Roseland…and West Pullman. Working-class
neighborhoods – many of which had changed rapidly from white to black in the
late ‘60s, ‘70s. And full of wonderful people who were proud of their
communities, proud of the steps they had taken to try to move into the middle
class, but were also worried about their futures, because in some cases, their
kids weren’t doing as well as they had; in some cases, these communities have
been badly neglected for a very long time. The distribution of city services
were [was] unequal. Schools were underfunded. There was a lack of opportunity.
And for three years, I tried to do something about it. And I am the first to
acknowledge that I did not set the world on fire. Nor did I transform these
communities in any significant way, although we did some good things. But it did
change me.
This community gave me a lot more than I was able to give in return,
because this community taught me that ordinary people, when working together,
can do extraordinary things. This community taught me that everybody has a story
to tell. That is important. This experience taught me that beneath the surface
differences of people that there were common hopes and common dreams and common
aspirations, common values that stitched us together as Americans. And so even
though I, after three years, left for law school, the lessons that had been
taught to me here as an organizer are ones that stayed with me, and effectively
gave me the foundation for my subsequent political career and the themes that I
would talk about as a state legislator and as a U.S. Senator and ultimately as
President of the United States.
Now, I tell you that history because on the back end now of my presidency,
now that it’s completed, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what is the
most important thing I can do for my next job? And what I’m convinced of is that
although there are all kinds of issues that I care about and all kinds of issues
that I intend to work on, the single most important thing I can do is to help in
any way I can prepare the next generation of leadership to take up the baton and
to take their own crack at changing the world. Because the one thing that I’m
absolutely convinced of is that yes, we confront a whole range of challenges
from economic inequality and lack of opportunity to a criminal justice system
that too often is skewed in ways that are unproductive to climate change to, you
know, issues related to violence. All those problems are serious. They’re
daunting. But they’re not insolvable.
What is preventing us from tackling them and making more progress really
has to do with our politics and our civic life. It has to do with the fact that
because of things like political gerrymandering, our parties have moved further
and further apart and it’s harder and harder to find common ground. Because of
money and politics, special interests dominate the debates in Washington in ways
that don’t match up with what the broad majority of Americans feel. Because of
changes in the media, we now have a situation in which everybody’s listening to
people who already agree with them and are further and further reinforcing their
own realities to the neglect of a common reality that allows us to have a
healthy debate and then try to find common ground and actually move solutions
forward.
And, so when I said in 2004 that there were no red states or blue states,
they’re the United States of America, that was an aspirational comment, but I
think it’s – and it’s one, by the way, that I still believe that in the sense
that when you talk to individuals one-on-one, people, there’s a lot more people
that have in common than divides them. But honestly, it’s not true when it comes
to our politics and our civic life.
And maybe more pernicious is the fact that people just aren’t involved,
they get cynical and they give up. And as a consequence, we have some of the
lowest voting rates of any advanced democracy and low participation rates than
translate into a further gap between who’s governing us and what we believe.
The only folks who are going to be able to solve that problem are going to
be young people, the next generation. And I have been encouraged everywhere I go
in the United States, but also everywhere around the world to see how sharp and
astute and tolerant and thoughtful and entrepreneurial our young people are – a
lot more sophisticated than I was at their age. And so the question then becomes
what are the ways in which we can create pathways for them to take leadership,
for them to get involved? Are there ways in which we can knock down some of the
barriers that are discouraging young people about a life of service? And if
there are, I wanna…I wanna work with them to knock down those barriers, and…and
to get this next generation and just to accelerate their move towards
leadership. Because if that happens, I think we’re going to be just fine. And I
end up being incredibly optimistic.
So, with that, what I’d like to do is to have our panelists here today each
tell them…tell us a little about themselves and what I asked them ahead of time.
I did give them a question ahead of time.
I asked them to describe for me what it is that they see among their peers
that they think discourages voting, participation, paying attention to some of
the issues, getting involved. Do they have any immediate suggestions of the
kinds of things that would get young people more involved and engaged and
discover their voices?
Once we’ve gone through the entire panel, then we’ll just open it up and
see how it works. And hopefully, we’ll be interesting. I find it interesting.
Hopefully, you’ll find it interesting. Alright?
So, we’re gonna start with Kathy. |
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发表于 2017-5-3 18:15:43