Troy and Barack

I’ve been giving some serious thought today to the points raised by Troy about achievement and personal responsibility. They were good points, even if he and I disagree on some of the particulars. As it happens, while I was thinking about this, the White House released a transcript of the speech the president will be giving to our nation’s school children in Virginia tomorrow morning, on the occasion of the first day of the new school year.

What strikes me about the speech is that President Obama makes exactly the same points that Troy does. The two of them are aligned on this issue to an eerily precise degree. Here is one excerpt from the President’s speech:

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

One thing that people who succeed seem to have in common is an early belief – starting back in childhood – that diving in and getting good at things is going to pay off for them. I think this is a quality shared by Troy, Barack Obama, myself, and all of the high achievers I know. Somehow there is the confidence – the certainty, you might say – that one is up to the task of attaining the level of mastery required. For me, for as far back as I could remember, there has always been a joy in mastering certain kinds of things (mainly things connected with art and words and music – and only later with math and technology).

This is a joy that perpetuates itself. You get those first modest successes, and it gives you even more confidence to try more ambitious things – to put in even more time, if necessary. But I think somewhere in your soul there needs to be that kernel to start with, that fierce belief that you’ve got what it takes, even when those around you do not yet have much reason to agree.

It’s clear to me that Troy and Barack and I share a goal of wishing to plant into the minds of young people that seed of self-confidence – of finding their own unique way of expressing their true potential.

Given this common cause, I find it disheartening that a weirdly hostile (and, I suspect, cynically dissembling) group of people in this country are trying to prevent their kids from hearing the speech – ostensibly in defense of some sort of right wing principles. The irony of this particularly inane form of political gamesmanship is that this president is about to give a speech to our nation’s children that is the very model of good old fashioned conservative principles: A fervent exhortation toward individual responsibility, hard work, and self-betterment.