Extract from “On and Off the Road with Barack Obama” by David Remnick, The New Yorker, January 27
“I think we are born into this world and inherit all the grudges and rivalries and hatreds and sins of the past,” he said. “But we also inherit the beauty and the joy and goodness of our forebears. And we’re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have, but I think our decisions matter. And I think America was very lucky that Abraham Lincoln was President when he was President. If he hadn’t been, the course of history would have been very different. But I also think that despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think that doesn’t diminish Lincoln’s achievements, but it acknowledges that at the end of the day we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.”
As Obama confides, ‘We just try to get our paragraph right.’ That’s the enigmatic point. What goes into ‘composing’ it, what comes out of reading and acting upon it, and how to ‘get it right’. Finally, who does he mean by the collective ‘we’?
Surely he means all of us should try to leave this world a better place. Even you and I.