Below I paraphrase my favorite quotes from Lyndon B Johnson's speech at the University of Michigan:
The purpose of protecting the life of our nation and preserving the
liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our
success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a nation.
For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For
half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry
to create an order of plenty for all of our people. The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom
to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to
advance the quality of our American civilization.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to
enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure
is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom
and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only
the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for
beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place
which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the
understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned
with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting
place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly
renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives
matches the marvelous products of our labor.
The three places where we begin to
build the Great Society: in our cities, in our countryside, and in our
classrooms. Fifty years from now,
there will be 400 million Americans, four-fifths of them in urban
areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double,
city land will double, and we will have to build homes, and highways,
and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first
settled.
Aristotle said, "Men come together in cities in order to live, but
they remain together in order to live the good life." It is harder and
harder to live the good life in American cities today.
The catalog of ills is long, there is the decay of the centers and
the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our
people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old
landmarks are violated.
Worst of all, expansion is eroding the precious and time honored
values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss
of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.
Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today
the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and
not beyond their borders.
New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your
generation to make the American city a place where future generations
will come not only to live, but to live the good life.
Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that
our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a
richer life of mind and spirit?
There are those timid souls that say this battle cannot be won; that
we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power
to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, and your
labor, and your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.
Let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will
look back and say, "It was then, after a long and weary way, that man
turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life."
This speech was given 50 years ago. Take a look at the last half century. As a society, have we been moving towards and building upon such ideals that allow a positive culture to flourish?
