Over the past several days I've been transcribing Howard Dean's Yearly Kos keynote address. Given the level of frustration a lot of us have toward Democrats caving to Bush yet again, I thought it might be useful to post the speech's conclusion as a diary. It speaks to the reality that change can take a long time, and requires an ongoing struggle...
When I was a freshman in college in 1968, Martin Luther King was killed, and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. And I remember very much exactly where I was that day, and exactly what that was like. Now, these young folks under 30, they learn about Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and John Lewis and folks like that--they learn about that in history books, but they didn't live it the way people in my generation lived it. They see it as a moment in history--it's history to them.
What I say to young folks is this: you need to remember that Martin Luther King was not just an ideal that we all worked towards in terms of inclusion and treating people properly. That he was a human being. It was 13 years between the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the signing of the Civil Rights Bill. Thirteen years! Not every day was a good day for Dr. King and his folks during those thirteen years. There were a lot of times that he and his folks had to get up and dust themselves off and go out and do something else that was really tough. And not all of them survived that.
And so what I say to all Americans, but particularly young people, is that this is not a one day or one election struggle. This is something we have to do every single day for the rest of our lives. (Cheers and applause.) Every single day for the rest of our lives. And when we get knocked down, we're going to stand up again for the core principles of America. Because America was knocked down by the far right wing of the Republican party in the last 8 years, and by God we're going to get up, and we're going to recover, and stand up for what we used to stand up for. We are going to regain the moral leadership that made America a great country, and we are going to live again in America, and stand up, and lead the world to the Promised Land. Thank you very much.