Inauguration Day

I watched President Obama's Inauguration speech today at work. I liked it very much. It was short, simple and to the point. His most memorable line referred to our country's need for a new Era of Responsibility, which is being picked up as the headline in several newspapers.

From the text of the speech, the new President said, "What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility-- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship."

It is well known that the new President is a keen student of Lincoln, from whom he probably derived a lot of inspiration for his choice of words.

From my perspective, I draw from a book I am presently reading, David Hackett Fischer's Paul Revere's Ride. In describing the character and personality of Paul Revere, Fischer writes that in the collective mind of Revolutionary America, rights and liberties did not rest on the individual, but rather, on the collective mantle of society. Men like Revere did not toil away solely in the pursuit of individual rights, but instead sacrificed themselves for the betterment of their town and state. To a man like Revere, the state was due its own set of liberties, and it was the job and responsibility of every citizen to establish and safeguard those collective rights.

This is a worldview that Obama may be seeking to resurrect. We live in a world that has flipped our Revolution's focus on its head. We are in love with all things individual. We are in need of a renewed focus on the greater good.