Radio City Music Hall
17 June 2008, 2000
President Bill Clinton spoke this evening as a part of the Radio City Music Hall speaker series titled, "Minds That Move the World" (Smother sat next to me drooling and making catcalls at him the entire time). He was the last speaker of the series. Prior speakers included John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Al Gore, James Carville, Arianna Huffington and Tucker Carlson.
Aside from the fact that he is a very eloquent speaker, incredibly poised and well spoken, his message was positive and uplifting yet realistic. Overall, President Clinton spoke about the three major issues facing our nation and the world: instability, inequality and unsustainability. Since we are all inter-dependent, our issues are not just our own because our actions affect other countries just as we share other countries' issues because their decisions affect us. We must work together and we must learn from each other. He really drove home the idea of working towards our future in order to pull ourselves out of the veritable hole that the current administration has lead us into (he was very classy when speaking about President Bush though and never outwardly shook his finger at the administration). He encouraged us to think about where we can be in a few years instead of dwelling on our current status and working towards creating products and initiatives to eliminate the harm we are doing to the Earth and our dependence on other nations. Although there will have to be major changes to big business and government in order to make strides in the right direction, we can all do something whether it be donating time, money or just making small changes in the way that we live. He gave examples of companies taking steps towards improving the environment and pushing for universal health care. He recommended making small loans to impoverished communities through a website called Kiva in order to help others across the world. He gave some remarkable comparisons between countries' energy usage, what they are doing to reduce their impact on the Earth, and statistics about the wealth of particular nations, health care, education and employment.
Moral of the story: We must focus on facing the issues of instability, inequality and unsustainability in order to build towards a better, more productive, more efficient, and healthier future for everyone. This will take time, but we can start now.
100 in 6 budget: $491
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