Reagan’s Hope in a Time of Challenge

posted at 5:51 pm on April 17, 2011 by Jazz Shaw
[ Republican Party ]   

Some recent speeches coming from both the White House and from congressional leaders have put me in a mood of pining. Not for the fjords, but for a more hopeful time. The debt crisis is a different type of challenge than we saw during either the cold war or the Cuban missile crisis, just to pick two examples, but it is just as serious. With that in mind, I invite you to take a moment and look back at the closing of Ronald Reagan’s second State of the Union address. Don’t worry, this part is short.

A hundred and twenty years ago, the greatest of all our Presidents delivered his second State of the Union message in this Chamber. “We cannot escape history,” Abraham Lincoln warned. “We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves.” The “trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest [last] generation.”

Well, that President and that Congress did not fail the American people. Together they weathered the storm and preserved the Union. Let it be said of us that we, too, did not fail; that we, too, worked together to bring America through difficult times.

Let us so conduct ourselves that two centuries from now, another Congress and another President, meeting in this Chamber as we are meeting, will speak of us with pride, saying that we met the test and preserved for them in their day the sacred flame of liberty—this last, best hope of man on Earth.
God bless you, and thank you.

words to ponder in the days to come.

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