“If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today. And here on Earth, we place our hands over our hearts, and commit ourselves as Americans to forging a country that is forever worthy of her gentle, happy spirit.”
Reader Interactions
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J. Michael Neal
I thought it was a very good speech. I didn’t get the same feelings from it that everyone else described, but funerals are when my emotional disconnect is at its greatest. They just don’t affect me like they do almost everyone else, so I’ll just have to take others’ words on just how moving it was.
drunken hausfrau
damn… I needed a good cry after all this. I would not survive my child’s death…
R-Jud
@drunken hausfrau: What you said. I missed the speech due to the time zone thingy. I’ll watch it tonight, when I can afford to cry.
In re the first video: Ithacapella is still going? Neat. Bombers represent!
thedeadcanary
Thanks for the video. Where is the school? Will have to watch the speech on this internet thingy, also due to time zone problems (Europe).
Angry Black Lady
They are in NYC. You should check them out on YouTube. They’re amazing.
Maody
Oh thank you for these beautiful young spirited young voices, ABL. As President Obama intimated, there is pure good in the country – those kids and their teacher are joy. Listening to more of the kids at PS22 now. Excellent company for a cup of coffee, a wood stove burning with my kitteh Mao in front. My heavy heart is uplifted.
IM
I always thought Obama – like a lot of american rhetoric – is to preachy.
But there is a time and place for everything. I never thought that tired ritual of (standing) ovations could be so touching.
Keith G
I know that President Obama is, in essence, his own head speech writer. Yet I want to praise the team that fleshed out this magnificent piece of oratory. It managed to do the almost impossible – be a big speech about big things and at the same time be a small, personal communication from the heart touching on both hurt and hope.
I bet parts of this speech came from ideas that were in the hopper for the SOTU or the team was just supernaturally talented to pull it together in two days.
I just You-Tubed it and watched it for the first time. Amazing. Brilliant.
pickledjazz
Brilliant,absolutely brilliant. This President, just has the ‘it’ factor. Strangely enough I cannot imagine any other, here and now, and for the longest of whiles, being able to do what he is sooo good at!
Emma
I am so glad my office is kind of secluded. I would hate to try to explain why I’m crying. The President has the ability to put into words the best of our nature, the ideal we should work towards.
West of the Cascades
Stay with me on this one after I say a “buzzword” — it looked like President Obama used a hard-copy of his speech to read from rather than a teleprompter. The whole right-wing meme about him reading from teleprompters is nuts, but I’m pretty sure that his decision of what form to read his text from had nothing to do with responding to them. Instead, having the hard copy makes him look more like a pastor of a church giving a weekly homily, and I think that might have been a conscious choice.
Conscious or not, it is exactly the right image, and needing to periodically drop his eyes and bow his head a bit to read from the printed pages correlates his body language to the beautiful words coming from his mouth and to the solemnity of the occasion.
Listening to this and crying while I do (I missed it live last night), I just feel sad for the people in this country who can listen to this man speak and be unable to hear his words – or who won’t even listen because of their prejudices. Just sad.
SBJules
Wow, what a wonderful way to greet the day despite me now being in tears. I loved the President’s speech. He stressed all the right points, I think.
Shinobi
I have mixed feeling about the speech. I thought it was excellent, he did a great job of honoring individuals and talking about the country and it was very moving. And the president is a very moving speaker as always.
I guess I just feel a little bad for the families, for me grief is very private, and this, well it is just part of a circus. If it were my family member, I wouldn’t want their death to be so political. But I guess they don’t have much choice in the matter.
PS
I told a friend on Tuesday that there is only one public figure in this country whose response I sincerely wanted to hear, not out of political calculation but out of genuine interest, and that was the President. He is, in my mind, the foremost public intellectual in this country, and last night showed why. Before anyone objects that it wasn’t an intellectual speech — yes, it was not, and although I had hoped for one, I was wrong. I have other disagreements with him, on which I believe him to be wrong, but they do not stop me asserting that we are fortunate to have this President.
asiangrrlMN
Thanks for the video, ABL. I love this group of kids. They give me hope. The president brought it last night. The last section of his speech, especially, really resonated with me.
deamous
Lovely, but did no one notice the first line of the song is “Imagine there’s no heaven”?
Gravie
Every time I see a video of the beautiful children of PS22 singing, my eyes well up, and this time in particular. They give themselves over completely to the meaning and the emotion of the lyrics, and to the power of the music.
I’m an a-religious person, and I don’t think “Imagine” is an anti-religion song. To me, it’s about overcoming the ideas that divide us (who gets to go to heaven, for example). And in that, it’s totally in keeping with everything we heard at the Tucson rally.
Haddie Nuff
Thank you for this! I can’t speak for all the people of Tucson, but it sure gave this one some comfort.