I apologize for the speech

All of us were delighted when Rocky Balboa survived his boxing match with Apollo Creed. Since then and before there have been a flood of movies about people overcoming odds and winning. At something. And yet this is not what happens in life. In life we all lose. Even when we win. I know that I’m faster than Jesse Owens. Today. A real insight into what it means to be a human being is much more complicated than a Hallmark card.

So why don’t politicians tell us the truth? Why don’t they say that the economy will take longer to recover. Or that we cannot continue to live such an expensive life style. Because we can’t take the truth.

We want the fairy tale. That we’re number 1. That we have been chosen by God to rule the world. America. Canada. Europe. The West. We don’t have confidence in ‘reality’. We want the ‘the shining city upon a hill’. Let’s not pretend that there weren’t people living on that hill when we arrived. Or that we hadn’t enslaved another group of people to build that city.

This is not liberal guilt. Its history. There are huge problems ahead of us. For our kids. Our grandchildren. All of our grandchildren. And there is the mystery of life itself. Why are we here? As a species. As individuals. If you cannot look death straight in the eyes then you’ve missed the point of being alive.