Barrack Obama on what he wanted to accomplished if he entered public life, from an interview with photographer Mariana Cook:
"My overriding vision is driven by children and what I see happening to children. And as African American, I end up being concerned about children in the inner cities, and what is happening to them, and the complete lack of any kind of stable framework in which they can grow and develop. A lot of that is determined by economics and the life chances and opportunities that they face or their parents face. A lot of it has to do with values, things like family values that are talked about all the time, and bandied about by politicians. But I think values aren't just individual. Values are collective. Children learn values from what they see around them, and if they see that their parents' lives are not valued, or that their community is not valued; if their schools are falling apart, and their streets are falling apart, and their homes are falling apart, and people's lives are falling apart -- because they don't have jobs or opportunity -- then it's very hard for children, out of thin air, to create values for themselves that can sustain them.
'And so I think that my priority is to restore a sense of public values, or a collective value to the debate. And that means recognizing that we are one big family, and that across racial lines, and across class lines, that we have mutual obligations and mutual responsibilities. Maybe that's where the public and the private meet, when it comes to couples or relationships, or families or tribes. But the overriding priority in all those associations is a sense of mutual responsibility and empathy, then being able to put yourself in another person's shoes. That's how the marriage between Michelle and me sustains itself. We can imagine the other person's hopes or pains or struggles. And we have to extend that beyond just the individual families to other people."
Story from PRI
