Proving the promise: Curing disease and building infrastructure as democracy's ultimate test

“ I think this generation is going to be marked by the competition between democracies and autocracies, because the world is changing so rapidly. The autocrats are betting on democracy not being able to generate the kind of unity needed to make decisions to get in that race. We can’t afford to prove them right. We have to show the world — and much more importantly, we have to show ourselves — that democracy works; that we can come together on the big things. It’s the United States of America for God’s sake.
Of course, building the infrastructure of tomorrow requires major investments today. ”

“ I firmly believe that democracy holds the key to freedom, prosperity, peace, and dignity. We must now demonstrate – with a clarity that dispels any doubt – that democracy can still deliver for our people and for people around the world. We must prove that our model isn't a relic of history; it's the single best way to realize the promise of our future. And, if we work together with our democratic partners, with strength and confidence, we will meet every challenge and outpace every challenger. ”

“ And I have to tell you, your election has been such an inspiration for women and girls across Canada, especially for black women and girls and for South Asian women and girls. So many of them have told me that directly.
I am so looking forward to working with you and your administration on conquering COVID, on working together to be sure our economies can come roaring back.
I couldn’t agree more with what the President said: that we have a real responsibility now — all of us — to show that democracy can deliver for our people, for Canadians, for Americans, and for the whole world. ”

“ And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.
Only by helping the least fortunate of its members to help themselves can the human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that is the right of all people.
Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action, not only against their human oppressors, but also against their ancient enemies—hunger, misery, and despair. ”

“ Every generation of Americans has faced a moment where they have been called on to protect our democracy, to defend it, to stand up for it.
And this is our moment.
My fellow Americans, we meet tonight at an inflection point. One of those moments that only a few generations ever face, where the decisions we make now will decide the course of this nation and of the world for decades to come.
We are not bystanders to history. We are not powerless before the forces that confront us. It is within our power, of We the People. We are facing the test of our time and the time for choosing is at hand. ”

“ When President Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, he had no army, no resources, and no clear strategy to win. But after 45 years of progress, funding research, training scientists and physicians, and treating millions of patients—we now have the army. We now have powerful new tools. And with this Moonshot, we now have a clear strategy for the road ahead. It matters because there’s a consensus that we’re at an inflection point—with science, medicine, and technology advancing faster than ever and offering real promise. ”

“ And because of the great docs up this staircase here, we’re going to beat cancer as we know it as well. We’re going to make sure, once and for all, that healthcare is a right, not a privilege, in this nation. ”

“ To save life, and to cure disease are imperative demands which grow more urgent, more impatient each year, and which suffice to quicken the efforts of the scientist and the true physician as well as the charlatan, and shape almost every problem which is considered worthy of attack to-day. ”

“ Despite the incredible advancements we have made in recent years, cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States. Behind this statistic are millions of Americans who know the distress of receiving a cancer diagnosis, and millions more who watch family members or friends courageously fight this disease and too often succumb to it. Cancer is brutal and cruel, and I intimately understand the incalculable human toll that this disease inflicts on patients and their loved ones—a toll that strikes communities of color at disproportionately high rates. ”

“ For my family, for the Vice President’s family, and for millions of families across our Nation, the fight against cancer is personal. Too many of us know the sinking feeling of shock and devastation when a loved one receives a diagnosis of cancer—too many of us know the unspeakable pain when the fight cannot be won. Each year, colorectal cancer claims more than 50,000 American lives, making it the second leading cause of cancer deaths in our Nation. ”

“ And what I want to talk with them about today is how we go about taking advantage of the work they’ve done to get us where we are today, because I think we’re on the cusp of some real breakthroughs across the board on cancer. And that’s what we’re going to talk about.
And probably to all of you, like all of us, cancer is personal for almost everybody. It’s probably the one word that is the most frightening word in the English language to people. When they hear that “C word,” cancer, it is — it is just devastating. ”

“ We could catch that cancer diagnosis quicker, with access to better roads, cleaner water, high-speed Internet that delivers information faster and more of it.
Above all, infrastructure is about meeting the needs of a nation and putting Americans to work and being able to do and get paid for doing — having good jobs. ”

“ Ukraine has the same rights that belong to every sovereign nation. We will stand in solidarity with Ukraine. We will stand in solidarity against Russia’s aggression. Period.
Now, it’s no secret that in the contest between democracy and autocracy, the United States — and I, as President — champion a vision for our world that is grounded in the values of democracy.
The United States is determined to defend and strengthen democracy at home and around the world. Because I believe democracy remains humanity’s greatest instrument to address the challenges of our time. ”

“ Though many of these values have come under intense pressure in recent years, even pushed to the brink in the last few weeks, the American people are going to emerge from this moment stronger, more determined, and better equipped to unite the world in fighting to defend democracy, because we have fought for it ourselves.
Over the past few days, we’ve been in close cooperation with our allies and partners to bring together the international community to address the military coup in Burma. ”

“ In the battle between democracy and autocracies, democracies are rising to the moment and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security.
This is the real test, and it’s going to take time. So, let us continue to draw inspiration from the iron will of the Ukrainian people.
To our fellow Ukrainian Americans who forged a deep bond that connects our two nations: We stand with you. We stand with you. ”

“ We also need to wield development and democracy, two of the most powerful weapons in our collective arsenals. Poor societies and dysfunctional states, as you know as well as I do, can become breeding grounds for extremism, conflict and disease. Non-democratic nations frustrate the rightful aspirations of their citizens and fuel resentment.
Our administration has set an ambitious goal to increase foreign assistance, to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015, to help eliminate the global educational deficit, and to cancel the debt of the world's poorest countries ”

“ It also requires a society that is supported by the pillars of a sustainable democracy – a strong legislature, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, a vibrant civil society, a free press, and an honest police force. It requires building the capacity of the world’s weakest states and providing them what they need to reduce poverty, build healthy and educated communities, develop markets, and generate wealth. ”

“ To know and counteract the causes of disease before they become effective is evidently the triumph of our art; but it will be long before mankind will be wise enough to accept the aid we could give them in this direction. Ignorance of the laws of health, and intemperance of all kinds, are too powerful for us. ”

“ And relatedly, I’m delighted to see five of the nation’s leading cancer centers are joining forces today to build on the work of the Cancer Moonshot I was able to do during the Obama-Biden administration to help break through silos and barriers in cancer research. We’re making progress.
There is so much we can do, so much progress within our reach. And that’s why I’m thankful to the folks here today for getting their vaccine shots: Gerald Bunn, who — and Corey Hamilton, both D.C. firefighters. ”

“ And I think the idea that we — we talked about, about renewing our partnership and the All-Island Consortium — Cancer Consortium. The U.S.-Ireland and Northern Ireland — it’s a partnership that’s — that I think we can learn a lot from one another. It’s one of the things that, as President, Taoiseach, I am going to focus heavily on with our National Institute of Health: on dealing with — with cancer. We’ve all been victims of it, in terms of our families. We all know what it’s like. And we’re going to make major investments in NIH and cancer research and development. ”

“ And I always ask at — when I talk about cancer, I ask the audience if they — to raise their hand, if any of them were suffering from cancer as I spoke, and/or they lost someone, and virtually 70 percent of every audience — whether or not it’s 4,000 people or 400 people. And a lot of folks in this room have, like many of you maybe have been victims of cancer and overcome it. ”

“ Investing in research and development help lead to lithium batteries, LED technology, the Internet itself. It helped lead to vaccine breakthroughs that are helping us beat COVID-19; to the Human Genome Project, which has led to breakthroughs in how we understand and fight cancer and other diseases. ”

“ It may be urged reasonably that science is the true cause of democracy and that science and democracy together are the influences most conducive to permanent and universal peace.
The applications of science in industry, agriculture and commerce, in the prevention of disease and of premature death, have abolished the need of excessive manual labor. It long ago became unnecessary for the great majority of the people to be held in bondage in order that a few free citizens might have education and opportunity, and slavery has been gradually driven from the world. ”

“ Science, on the other hand, has laid the foundations on which the future rests. The applications of science to the arts and to commerce, permitting one man to do what formerly required ten, and giving more nearly than ever before to each the return of his labor, have made modern democracy possible. The methods of science, slowly spreading and exerting their control, have made democracy comparatively safe. The results of science will help to make democracy worth the while. ”

“ With proton therapy, the dose stops right at the tumor so you’re not treating normal tissues. So it’s a major advancement in the treatment of cancers.
THE PRESIDENT: Treating normal tissue sometimes is a very bad thing. Just — it also — it can destroy a normal tissue. It can destroy the cancer — hit that — but it goes through the cancer and destroys whatever is beyond it. ”

“ But we’ll do it by setting aside politics and embracing science.
On another subject, the right to vote — that should bring us together as well, but it now divides us. This is a democracy, and the right to vote is fundamental. The fact that there was a record turnout in America in the last election, in the midst of a pandemic, should be something we celebrated, not attacked.
The fact that you held a free and fair election in Georgia that stood up to recount after recount, court case after court case, is something you should be proud of. ”

“ Increase economic growth.
There’s so much more, but help is here. But I’m here in this great hospital to talk about a third way to help. And that is for your health — the third type of help, and that’s healthcare.
I just concluded a tour of the Radiation Oncology Department here at the James Cancer Center, which was expanded thanks to a $100 million grant in the Affordable Care Act that Sherrod Brown was instrumental in making happen. That’s in addition to the research funding Ohio State received under the Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot. ”

“ The three causes that have formed the modern mind continue to operate with increasing efficacy. You are all aware that discoveries in the positive sciences are multiplying daily; that geology, organic chemistry, history, entire branches of physics and zoology, are contemporary productions; that the growth of experience is infinite, and the applications of discovery unlimited; that means of communication and transport, cultivation, trade, mechanical contrivances, all the elements of human power, are yearly spreading and concentrating beyond all expectation. ”

“ I encourage citizens, government agencies, private businesses, nonprofit organizations, and other interested groups to join in activities that will increase awareness of what Americans can do to prevent and control cancer. ”

“ The same thing is true with regard to the spread of the acute contagia, the burden of venereal disease, the obscure ill effects of defective eyes and ears and teeth, and a dozen other problems which in greater or less degree concern the public health. In every one of these cases the results we are striving for can only be reached by spreading a clear knowledge of the ways in which disease spreads, and the ways in which it is prevented, among the mothers who bring up babies and the men who pay rent in the tenement and work in the stores and factories. ”

“ The strength of a democracy is not in bureaucracy, it is in the people and their communities. In everything we do, let us unleash the potential of our most precious resource--our citizens. We must return to families, communities, counties, cities, states and institutions of every kind, the power to chart their own destiny, and the freedom and opportunity provided by strong economic growth. ”

“ A nation's strength, moreover, is a matter of blood and brain fiber. Urban degeneracy is an accepted biological fact. The dissipation, lack of physical exercise in the open air, and high pressure living and working leaves in its trail a progeny diminishing in numbers and decadent in those high qualities essential to good government.
Democracy, as a permanent institution, however, is not yet an assured fact. ”

“ When Christ told the lawyer that to 'love thy neighbor as thyself' was one of the essentials of salvation, he laid the corner-stone for a pure and honest democracy, without which underlying principle there can be no lasting democratic government. We now know, in medicine, that much of longevity and good health and power of recuperation depend upon the ideals of the individual, and their inspiring influence. ”

“ Think of letting a man build the world’s greatest bridge because he is popular! You accuse me of plagiarizing from Pythagoras, but in truth, you who believe in democracy are the Pythagoreans of politics,—you believe in number as your god. Your equality is the equality of the unequal, and is all a matter of words and never of reality; your liberty is anarchy, it is the congenital sickness wherein your democracy was conceived and delivered, and whereof it inevitably dies; your freedom of speech is a license to lie ”

“ But if drifting in the grip of the Going Concern leads to disease in a nation, and if we must not fall into panic because that results in crime, nor yet suffer revolt because that ends in suicide, what course remains open to us? Surely that of control, which in a democracy means self-control. If this War has proved anything, it has proved that these gigantic forces of modern production are capable of control. ”

“ It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future. Among democracies, I think through all the recorded history of the world, the building of permanent institutions like libraries and museums for the use of all the people flourishes. ”

“ Build halls, where knowledge shall be freely diffused among men, and not shut up within the narrow walls of narrow institutions. Place spacious parks in your cities, and unloose their gates as wide as the gates of the morning to the whole people. As there are no dark places at noon-day, so education and culture, the true sunshine of the soul—will banish the plague-spots of democracy ”

“ And if it is not to interfere unduly with freedom of action or personal liberty, the people must have an organization by which to maintain control over it. Thus there must be an organization to ensure efficient SERVICE, and there must be an organization to ensure democracy, or POPULAR CONTROL. If both organizations are effective, we have an EFFICIENT DEMOCRACY, toward which we have been striving through all our history, but which we have not yet completely attained.
A government may be efficient in performing service for the people without being democratic. ”

“ And I’m thinking of those who demonstrated the courage to protect the integrity of our democracy – Democrats and Republicans, election officials and judges, elected representatives and poll workers – before and after the election.
This sad chapter in our history has reminded us that democracy is fragile. That it must always be defended. That we must be ever vigilant. That violence and extremism has no place in America. And that each of us has a duty and responsibility as Americans, and especially as leaders, to defend the truth and to defeat the lies. ”

“ The right to vote is sacred and fundamental — it is the right from which all of our other rights as Americans spring. This landmark legislation is urgently needed to protect that right, to safeguard the integrity of our elections, and to repair and strengthen our democracy. It will rein in the outrageous gerrymandering that distorts our democracy. It will empower the Justice Department to crack down on laws that curtail voting rights along racial lines. It will reform our campaign finance system to amplify the voices of the people — not the powerful. ”

“ It is the responsibility of the Federal Government to expand access to, and education about, voter registration and election information, and to combat misinformation, in order to enable all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy. ”

“ We each have to reject political violence with — with all the moral clarity and conviction this nation can muster. Now.
We can’t let the integrity of our elections be undermined, for that is a path to chaos.
Look, I know poli- — politics can be fierce and mean and nasty in America. I get it. I believe in the give-and-take of politics, in disagreement and debate and dissent.
We’re a big, complicated country. But democracy endures only if we, the people, respect the guardrails of the republic. Only if we, the people, accept the results of free and fair elections. ”

“ Democracy begins and will be preserved in we, the people’s, habits of heart, in our character: optimism that is tested yet endures, courage that digs deep when we need it, empathy that fuels democracy, the willingness to see each other not as enemies but as fellow Americans. ”

“ That’s why respected conservatives, like Federal Circuit Court Judge Michael Luttig, has called Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans, quote, a “clear and present danger” to our democracy.
But while the threat to American democracy is real, I want to say as clearly as we can: We are not powerless in the face of these threats. We are not bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy.
There are far more Americans — far more Americans from every — from every background and belief who reject the extreme MAGA ideology than those that accept it. ”

“ Democracy, after all, is a disease; an attempt on the part of the botched to lay down for all the laws of social health. You may observe the disease in its growth-process by studying the woman movement. Woman’s first and last function is that of bearing robust children. ”

“ For it is one of the peculiar intellectual accompaniments of democracy that the concept of the insoluble becomes unfashionable—nay, almost infamous. To lack a remedy is to lack the very license to196 discuss disease. The causes of this are to be sought, without question, in the nature of democracy itself. It came into the world as a cure-all, and it remains primarily a cure-all to this day. Any boil upon the body politic, however vast and raging, may be relieved by taking a vote; any flux of blood may be stopped by passing a law. ”

“ I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. ”

“ This is an old indictment, searching to the very heart of democracy. Plato made it of ancient Athens, while, more recently and trenchantly, Ibsen has made it for all modern society.
The argument runs thus: democracy means the rule of the majority. Well, there are more fools than wise men in the world, more ignorant than intelligent. Thus the rule of the majority must mean the rule of the fools over the wise men, of the ignorant over the intelligent. ”

“ Our liberty reversed and charters gone,
And we made servants to Opinion.
The remedy for the evils of license is not in the elimination of popular restraint, but precisely in bringing the people to respect and follow their right leaders. The cure of democracy is not more democracy, but better democracy.
Nor is such a cure dependent primarily on the appearance, in a community, of men capable of the light: for these the world always has, and these we too have in abundance; it depends rather on so relating these select natures to the community that they shall be also men of leading. ”

“ Democracy to be real and effective must succeed in throwing up into the positions of administrative power the most trustworthy of its able citizens. In other words it must incorporate and make use of the principle of aristocracy; government by the best—best in spirit, not best-born. Rightly seen, there is no tug between democracy and aristocracy; aristocracy should be the means and machinery by which democracy works itself out. What then can be done to increase in the average voter intelligence and honesty, public spirit and independence? Nothing save by education. ”

“ The path of democracy is education.
XIX THE SOLUTION FOR DEMOCRACY When we say that the path of democracy is education, we do not mean that there is an easy solution of its problem. There is no patent medicine we can feed the American people and cure it of its diseases. There is no specific for the menaces that threaten. Eternal vigilance and effort are the price, not only of liberty, but of every good of man. Let things alone, and they get bad; to keep them good, we must struggle everlastingly to make them better. ”

“ Nothing future is quite secure; states enough have inwardly rotted; and democracy as a whole may undergo self-poisoning. But, on the other hand, democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and Utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. The best of us are filled with the contrary vision of a democracy stumbling through every error till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with beauty. ”

“ That democracy is impossible? No more so than that a man cannot be healthy because he cannot enjoy perfect health. The defects when recognized become problems to be remedied by actions, institutions, checks, and restraints that are themselves informed by the principle or ideal of democracy. The remedies are of course imperfect, fallible, and unguaranteed. But we do not therefore reject them. We continue to improve them—if we are democrats. And we test by the fruits of the process the validity of the unrealizable democratic principle that serves as our functional guide. ”

“ Never before has there been such a window of opportunity to promote a higher standard of living through improved access to quality education and adequate health care. Working together, we can prove that democracy provides the means for improving the daily lives of all the citizens of the Americas. ”

“ These later years have been living years—fruitful years for the people of this democracy. For they have brought to us greater security and, I hope, a better understanding that life's ideals are to be measured in other than material things. Most vital to our present and our future is this experience of a democracy which successfully survived crisis at home; put away many evil things ”