My fellow citizens, when we come together to inaugurate a president, we come together to confirm the power and the beauty of the idea our great republic is founded on. We come together to celebrate the power of the promise made in the “Declaration of Independence”: the promise that everybody on this earth is created equal and endowed with the same inalienable rights. This is the true creed of our times and the world has been looking to America to see this promise fulfilled for more than 200 years. This creed is what binds this nation together and from our shores, it has spread all across the globe.
We have received this precious gift from our founding fathers and we bear responsibility to keep this promise alive. I will not allow my gratitude and my humility to cloud my vision, however. I will not shirk from the responsibility I shoulder when I accept this precious inheritance and I urge you, my fellow Americans, to do the same. Our founding fathers were merely human and they were flawed. They murdered Native Americans and stole their lands. They kept slaves and condemned innocent women, children and men to unspeakable misery for generations. We still feel the reverberations of their deeds today.
We will not naively judge the past by the standards of the present, but we won’t allow our gratitude and the love for our country to callously disregard the unnecessary human suffering caused in our nation’s past. Only if we dare to acknowledge the painful truth and continue the journey to bridge the meaning of the words in the declaration with the realities of our time, only then we prove ourselves to be worthy heirs of the promise made at the founding of our great republic.
I take my oath of office at a time of great danger for our nation: but it is not the pandemic, which has killed far too many of our citizens or another nation, be it Russia or China, which poses the greatest danger to the survival of our republic. It’s our unwillingness to see ourselves, our almost childlike inability to face the truth about who we are and what we have done.
Our founding fathers, for all their flaws, would be appalled by our conduct. We have become blind to our dark side. Our flag has become the wool over our eyes. We have become addicted to war and violence. We have all but forgotten our noble tradition of providing refuge to the poor and the persecuted. We have kept immigrants in cages and ripped their families apart. We have turned our weapons against ourselves, brutally repressing protests demanding justice and persecuting journalists for uncovering war crimes.
We have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the Middle East, fighting a war on terror we can’t win. On the contrary, our violent acts ensure that the children of our victims hate us with ever greater passion. We are spawning new terrorists every day. Our founding fathers fought heroically to free themselves from imperial rule. My fellow Americans, ask yourselves: how would our founding fathers judge us? What would they say to our, to the American Empire?
We maintain military bases in every corner of the world. Our war machine is the most fearsome and expensive in the history of the world. Yet victory eludes us time and again. We constantly profess the love for our soldiers, but these proclamations ring hollow. While we thank them for their service and glorify their sacrifice, we continue to send our sons and daughters to kill and be killed in senseless, unwinnable wars.
Are we a nation of deluded infants? Has it come to that? I believe we are better than this. I believe we are worthy of the great inheritance. We can see ourselves, we can face up to our truth: yes, we have built an empire. We have built an empire in the believe that we needed to in the defence of our freedom, but we have failed to face up to this truth.
We have alienated many other nations because instead of shouldering the imperial responsibility and leading an empire of reason and civilization, we have allowed ourselves to fall far short of our ideals. We have preached human rights, but we have supported violent coups and unjust regimes. We were attacked and we didn’t seek justice. We sought revenge. We have abducted, tortured and killed innocent people all over the world, people created equal and endowed with the same inalienable rights.
The United States, like any other nation, has the right to act in its national interest and to safeguard its national security. Our national interest no longer is the common good, the well being of all Americans, however. Our national interest has been captured by a small, corrupt elite who serve nobody but their own monetary interest. Many in our elite have fallen prey to the oldest temptation: idolatry.
They have bowed down to idols and betrayed their better nature, they have chosen the route of self-enslavement. Their appetites have shaped themselves as gods and these false gods have taken command. It would too easy to just blame the elites, however. Our whole culture has been infected by a slavish admiration of wealth and power. The money changers have taken the high seats in the temple of our civilization.
Today, we say: Enough! We will bear it no longer. Today, we begin to restore that temple to the ancient truths. These ancient truths are inscribed in the heart of every human being and my great predecessor FDR expressed them in this way: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”
We will no longer be enslaved by our fears and our appetites. We will no longer be enslaved by the illusion that we live to serve the economy. We will no longer slavishly admire the money hoarders while our brothers and sisters are begging in the streets. It’s morning in America, a new day has come. We will relearn to discipline our appetites, we will build an economy that serves the people.
By establishing a universal basic income, we will make sure that wealth is shared and nobody has to live on the street. And to the ones who fear that a UBI will make people lazy and complacent, I say: You should learn to trust the American spirit. A UBI will liberate the creativity and entrepreneurship of the many who have been struggling through no fault of their own.
With a UBI, we ensure that the amazing progress of technology and the unstoppable advance of automation will serve the common good. By extending Medicare to every American, we will make sure that freedom for Americans is more than empty word. As long as we live in fear of becoming sick and ending up in bankruptcy, we’re not free.
We will no longer squander precious resources on fighting a war on drugs which has brought so much misery to our own citizens, as well as to our neighbours in Mexico and the people of South America. In the spirit of seeking the truth and falling prey to deception no longer, we will let go of the puritan illusion that a culture without intoxicants is desirable or possible.
America will once again be a beacon for the freedom of the individual and this freedom is based on ownership of our bodies. No government has the right to tell a free citizen what to do with her body. We will legalize and tax drugs. We will create a safe, regulated market for all the substances which are currently sold and consumed illegally. We will spend the additional revenue on prevention, drug education and the treatment of addiction.
Now that we have found the courage to face the dark side of our magnificent achievements, we are finally ready to take on the challenge of climate change. The world has grown weary of American leadership; my administration will work tirelessly to regain the trust of the world’s nations.
This work will start here, right here at home. In America, we now realize like never before that we need each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well. To achieve our goals, we must move forward as a disciplined and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the common good. Without such discipline no progress is made and no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. Here at home, this larger good will take the form of the Green New Deal.
We will renew and rebuild our power stations, our airports, our highways, our schools, our roads and bridges. Our greatest primary task is to put our national house in order and to put our people to work. In large part, we will accomplish this through direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war. We will turn our war machine into the greatest power for reform and renewal the world has ever seen. We will deploy the skill, excellence and bravery of our soldiers to serve this higher purpose.
We will once again become the shining city upon a hill and set an example for the world. The time of wasting blood and treasure in senseless wars is over. Now is not the time for the human family to fight each other. Now is the time for all us to stand together against a common enemy. The climate crisis has given us the greatest gift, if only we are willing to accept it. Our human hearts seek the bond and certainty of belonging to a group and all too often our groups have faced each other off in battle.
Let us face this greatest danger our species has ever encountered together as one human family. Let us stand together to preserve the fathomless beauty of our home in this vast, inhospitable universe. We have a larger battle to fight, it’s the battle for the survival of mankind and America is once again offering its leadership to the peoples of the world. In this dedication of my nation’s task, I humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one in our great human family. May He guide me in the days to come.
More than English 