Presidential aspiration
by digby
There are always lots of great presidential speeches to choose from on President’s Day. But I’ve always been fond of this one: Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech:
“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”
These freedoms have advanced throughout the globe since that time. But not at once or in any permanent sense. Indeed, there are many days in which it’s obvious that all of these freedoms are under attack, even here. But the aspiration is meaningful and important. It’s really the basis for all of modern American liberal ideology. Maybe if we embraced it more fully and forthrightly, we might even accomplish its goals.
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