Just for the record…

January 21, 2009

Filed in: The Home Front, The Way We Live Now

The United States swore a new president in yesterday. You may have heard?

(photo ganked from The New York Times)

It’s silly to blog about the most-covered event since 9/11, so just skip this post; it’s only for my digital posterity (since T tried in vain to obtain some hard-paper copies of the Times this morning, and I forgot this afternoon to look in Swellville, where no paper ever sells out because everyone already knows all they need to). Though you may want to scroll down for a pic of some prominent members of Generation O …

Here are my favorite quotes from the speech:

“Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

“Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions—that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply.”

“The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”

“We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

“And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”

“Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old. These things are true.”

(photo ganked from The Swellville Chronicle)