“It would be hard to overstate how fervently vast stretches of the globe wanted the election to turn out as it did”
(New York Times on The Promise - For Many Abroad, an Ideal Renewed)
Yup, here too! TPM have a full transcript of Obama’s speech.
The new American president sure is setting himself up with some high expectations. Awesome! Enough with pandering to the regular guy. Let’s have smart people govern instead. What a concept!
(Update - If you have a BitTorrent client then I have a .torrent for a high resolution (1280x720) version of the victory speech. Right now there are about 60 seeders, so it should be pretty fast).
Immensely disappointing (and frustrating to many) on the other hand is that the voters seem to be passing prop 8. Yikes.
On one of the news programs earlier they had interviews with some supporters. The best arguments they had was some hand-waving about their children. That’s even more offensive than them voting yes on the proposition! Don’t attribute political opinions or labels to your children - and much less sexuality. Look lady, your kid is 5 years old. I promise that other than your indoctrination he has absolutely no opinion or judgement on the matter.
In the mall the other day I walked by a stand with baby clothes. One had a text on it saying “Lifelong Democrat”. It’s the same thing: Not cool. While our children are overwhelmingly likely to grow up with the political leanings of their parents, it’s completely unfair to label them as such until they at least have had a chance of forming their own opinions.
The second verse seems most appropriate:
On Children
Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Tim.
p.s. Movable Type didn't let me use OpenID to login. It gave an error saying "Undefined subroutine &Compress::Zlib::memGunzip called at /home/mt/MT/extlib/URI/Fetch.pm line 111" :-)