And yet ...
Nineteen years ago, the people of Czechoslovakia stood up to the dictators who had abused them for twenty years and told them, no more; and they stood down. Within months, the entire edifice of the Iron Curtain had collapsed, and the Czechs, as well as many of their then-allies throughout Eastern Europe, are now our allies.
Seventeen years ago, after a long, drawn out struggle which had lasted a generation and more, the apartheid regime of South Africa filed itself into the dustbin of history.
Sixty years ago, after a decades-long fight, theEnglish British walked away from their Indian Empire, leaving the people of that subcontinent free, again, to choose their own destiny.
None of these changes yielded utopias; none can. But they were proof that, with struggle and perserverence, things can be changed, and that the cynics among us are, at best, wrong.
Today yields proof of that same proposition.
Forty-five years ago, a man whom the FBI considered to be a dangerous revolutionary led a protest march in the nation's capital; a protest against the great American evil of that generation: laws which mandated discrimination based upon the color of a man's skin, and which demanded that men of different colors be seperated. Those laws were, above all else, directed at black men; they were a legacy of centuries of oppression which swept other minorities up merely as an afterthought.
Tonight, a black man is accepting the presidential nomination of the Democratic party - the party of segregation.
I do not know if that man will be a good president; I do not know if I will vote for him. And if he is to be our president, that presidency will not yield a utopia, nor will electing him solve all of our nation's problems in one swoop.
And yet the power of this moment cannot be denied. With work, and with perserverence, we can change the world. It has happened before our very eyes.
Nineteen years ago, the people of Czechoslovakia stood up to the dictators who had abused them for twenty years and told them, no more; and they stood down. Within months, the entire edifice of the Iron Curtain had collapsed, and the Czechs, as well as many of their then-allies throughout Eastern Europe, are now our allies.
Seventeen years ago, after a long, drawn out struggle which had lasted a generation and more, the apartheid regime of South Africa filed itself into the dustbin of history.
Sixty years ago, after a decades-long fight, the
None of these changes yielded utopias; none can. But they were proof that, with struggle and perserverence, things can be changed, and that the cynics among us are, at best, wrong.
Today yields proof of that same proposition.
Forty-five years ago, a man whom the FBI considered to be a dangerous revolutionary led a protest march in the nation's capital; a protest against the great American evil of that generation: laws which mandated discrimination based upon the color of a man's skin, and which demanded that men of different colors be seperated. Those laws were, above all else, directed at black men; they were a legacy of centuries of oppression which swept other minorities up merely as an afterthought.
Tonight, a black man is accepting the presidential nomination of the Democratic party - the party of segregation.
I do not know if that man will be a good president; I do not know if I will vote for him. And if he is to be our president, that presidency will not yield a utopia, nor will electing him solve all of our nation's problems in one swoop.
And yet the power of this moment cannot be denied. With work, and with perserverence, we can change the world. It has happened before our very eyes.
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