Remarks to Orlando Rotary Club
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure to address the Rotary Club luncheon in Orlando, FL. I covered a lot of ground–randing from the war in Afghanistan, to the failure of our elected officials to meet big challenges.
I began:
Friends, to put it simply, American power is in crisis. Economically, we face continued turmoil and uncertainty. Politically, we are distracted by persistent partisanship. Our military is overextended by two wars and decades of mismanagement. We continue to under-invest in America’s human capital even while we face a diverse array of challenges from terrorists, nuclear proliferators, energy dependence, rising powers, environmental decline, and broad revolutions in communications technology and commerce. In the twenty-first century, the United States risks becoming less powerful, less competitive, and ultimately less secure.
We find ourselves in this mess for a lot of reasons: for too long we have lacked leaders willing to take the long-view on important issues. For just as long, the American public has been subjected to a steady stream of distortion and misinformation in the form of talking points repeated ad nauseum on talk-radio and all three cable news networks. It’s a disservice to our democracy. The truth is that we need more dialogue and less diatribe.
But it’s more than that. Our institutions are failing us, too. Across society, whether we are talking about our schools, our businesses, our churches, or our government, we are let down time after time.
The entire speech can be downloaded here.
