The inaugural address that I hope to hear

Brian Till

Monday, Jan. 5, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Sixty-six years ago was an equally unsettling time in this country. Standing in this very spot, a slender man, barely able to stand on his own, told us that we had “nothing to fear but fear itself.” He would go on to become a great president. Today, my fellow Americans, we have more to fear.

But they are not the fears that we’ve debated and conjured for the last decade. Those are not the right fears. Not the fear of Islamic extremism, the fear illegal immigrants stealing jobs, nor the illusion of WMD in the hands of a tyrant half a world away. Those are not the forces that should harness our angst.

What we do have to fear is our own greed, our own indolence, and our own ambivalence. Those are the powers that should anchor our concern.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the wars we wage today is that the number of brave young souls lost in Iraq and Afghanistan may well be exceeded by unit mates -- men and women our fallen heroes often died to protect -- who have since taken their own lives, once safe and at home here on American soil. To those languishing veterans whose needs have gone unmet, hold steadfast. Among the first measures I take as president will be to make sure you and your families receive the treatment that’s been promised to you but never delivered, the medical keep you’ve more than earned and the financial support to raise your families with dignity.

To those millions of Americans who have lost jobs in the last year, I urge you, too: Hold strong. America will rebuild; America will build green, and she won’t be able to do any of that without you.

And let me be clear to all those listening today: I will fall short. Over the next four years, not everything this government tries will succeed, but neither will it all fail. And we will not be in the same place we are today four years from now. But how far we move forward from this point is as much in each of your hands as it is in my own.

You know what should scare us most? Our own hesitancy to engage the challenges of the 21st century.

I don’t need to speak about America’s crumbling infrastructure, our tired fleet of airliners, our stretched military or our inefficient ways of life. These are the strains and burdens that you see every day, that you live each day. But it can no longer be ignored. It’s been too easy to sit idle, to neglect what we all know -- that America must be renewed, reborn, reinvigorated for the 21st century.

But we should find solace knowing that America’s destiny remains uniquely of her own design. That is the American dream, the American promise, the American way.

There was one steamy July night in 1969, when we reached up and brushed the face of God — an American man walked across the moon’s white face — and for a moment, just a moment, all Americans breathed as one. The soul of a nation reemerged after years of division and strife.

We felt it again one morning in September seven years ago. It was a day of fire, a day of heroes and the end of an era. Our hearts sank as one.

We felt it in 1945, when sons and brothers and husbands continents away, battling a Third Reich and an imperial Japan, could finally lay down their arms.

I ask if we might feel that way again, now. Without triumph or tragedy. I ask if we might be unified once more, solely by the recognition of the magnitude of the challenges we face and the cooperation required to restore America to her mantle.

Because enough voices chorused together can change this world; and enough hands lifting at once can move mountains; and enough minds opened at once can reverse the hate and fear we’ve accrued for so long.

Can we be a nation that spends as much time helping others as it does on self-indulgence? A nation that strives to embody its founding ideals rather than evade them? I ask you — can we be that America again? Can we be those Americans once more?

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These are some of the threads I hope that President Obama might stumble across when Jon Favreau, his 27-year-old speechwriter — who’s holed up in some coffee shop, trying to craft one of the world’s most historic speeches — presents a draft to the president-elect.

Brian Till, one of the nation’s youngest syndicated columnists, writes for Creators Syndicate. He also is a research associate for the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington.