Here, in this story from the very dawn of the American Republic, is a beautiful picture of the American Dream. I’m not talking about the counterfeit American dream of a certain number of cars and a certain number of kids in a house of a certain number of square feet. I’m talking about the real American Dream: the dream that inspired our ancestors to leave all they knew and all they loved to come to a land of opportunity and freedom. The dream that inspires parents to take a second job, to scrimp and save so their children can go to college. The dream that inspires our courageous soldiers to leave the comforts of home for arid lands where they daily risk their lives in the defense of freedom.
THIS is the dream: that our children would have more opportunity, more peace, more freedom, and more abundance than we had. We struggle now, we face trouble now, so that our children may have peace.
And here we arrive at a troubling trend in the direction of our country today. We’ve become so enraptured by quarterly profits, overnight successes, political band-aids, and other instant pudding ideas, that we have lost sight of the long view, of the fact that the decisions we make NOW have consequences not just for ourselves, but for our children and for our children’s children. Posterity are the great silent constituency; they are the heirs of the laws, the debts, and the investments we make now.
I am running for Congress because I want to give voice to this voiceless multitude of those who will come after us. They will be our judges in history. They will be the ones who name our generation. Do we aspire to share in the honor of the generation that is now passing—what has been called “the greatest generation”— or will we settle for the stature of “bubble surfers,” “payday loan sharks,” or “the generation when America began its decline.” We must not squander the bounty and splendor that our fathers and mothers left us as an inheritance. We must now make the hard choices and the bold stands for justice that history demands of us.

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