Yesterday, former president Barack Obama made his first public
appearance since leaving office when he hosted a discussion at the
University of Chicago with students from across the city.
At the event, he said the work he did in Chicago as a community
organizer laid the groundwork for his life in politics. Reed the full
text below...
Thank you. Hey! Thank you. Everybody have a seat. Have a seat. So what's been going on while I've been gone?
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. 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.
They
formed an organization and hired me as a community organizer. 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 in Hyde Park but I
worked in communities like Roseland and 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 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 red states or blue states, they're the United States of America,
that was aspirational comment, but I think it's―and it's one that I
still believe, 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 civic life.
Maybe more pernicious is people are not involved and they give up.
As a
consequence, we have some of the lowest voting rates of any 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 want to work with them to knock down those barriers.
And to get this next generation and to accelerate their move towards
leadership. Because if that happens, I think we're going to be just
fine.
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