Obama Ipsum

So one Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. Too many tears have flowed.

I'm talking about something more substantial. America, we are better than these last eight years. Likewise, many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state.

But as Americans, we also know that this is a nation of laws, and we cannot have those laws broken when more than 2,000 people cross our borders illegally every day. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too. The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland, but don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. But I also know that human progress cannot be denied.

That we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. In the following century, men and women of faith waded into the battles over prison reform and temperance, public education and women's rights - and above all, abolition. I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. You make a big election about small things. Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together.

And meeting them won't be easy. We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. For human history has often been a record of nations and tribes subjugating one another to serve their own interests. On education, we will expand exchange programs, and increase scholarships, like the one that brought my father to America, while encouraging more Americans to study in Muslim communities.

Thank you, and God bless America.