The Audacity of Hope

back in the eighties, I would often challenge neighborhood leaders by asking them
where they put their time, energy, and money. Those are the true tests of what we value,
I’d tell them, regardless of what we like to tell ourselves. If we aren’t willing to pay a
price for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize
them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.
By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so
much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. We say we value the
legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of
debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of
American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then
structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less
and less of our time.
And yet a part of us knows better. We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times
tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them
more often than we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values are
our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize that
they are subject to challenge, can be poked and prodded and debunked and turned inside
out by intellectuals and cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durable
and surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We can
make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be tested
against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just
words.
To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.