For years we mostly treated citizens like they were consumers or spectators, sort of political couch potatoes who were supposed to watch the TV ads either promising something for nothing or playing on their fears and frustrations, and more and more of our citizens now get most of their information in very negative and aggressive ways that are hardly conducive to honest and open conversations. But the truth is, we have got to stop seeing each other as enemies just because we have different views.

If you go back to the beginning of this country, the great strength of America as de Tocqueville pointed out when he came here a long time ago, has always been our ability to associate with people who were different from ourselves, and to work together to find common ground. And in this day everybody has a responsibility to do more of that. We simply cannot wait for a tornado, a fire, or a flood to behave like Americans ought to behave in dealing with one another.

I want to finish up here by pointing out some folks that are up with the First Lady that represent what I am trying to talk about, citizens. I have no idea what their party affiliation is or who they voted for in the last elections. But they represent what we ought to be doing.

Cindy Perry teaches second graders to read in AmeriCorps in rural Kentucky. She gains when she gives. She is a mother of four. She says that her service inspired her to get her high school equivalency last year. She was married when she was a teenager--stand up, Cindy--she was married when she was a teenager, she had four children, but she had time to serve other people, to get her high school equivalency, and she is going to use her AmeriCorps money to go back to college.

Stephen Bishop is the police chief of Kansas City. He has been a national leader--stand up, Stephen--he has been a national leader in using more police in community policing, and he has worked with AmeriCorps to do it, and the crime rate in Kansas City has gone down as a result of what he did.

Corporal Gregory Depestre went to Haiti as part of his adopted country's force to help secure democracy in his native land: And I might add, we must be the only country in the world that could have gone to Haiti and taken Haitian Americans there who could speak the language and talk to the people, and he was one of them, and we are proud of him.

The next two folks I have had the honor of meeting and getting to know a little bit. The Reverend John and the Reverend Diana Cherry of the A.M.E. Zion Church in Temple Hills, Maryland. I would like to ask them to stand. I want to tell you about them. In the early eighties they left government service and formed a church in a small living room in a small house in the early eighties. Today that church as 17,000 members. It is one of the three or four biggest churches in the entire United States. It grows by 200 a month. They do it together, and the special focus of their ministry is keeping families together.

Two things they did make a big impression on me. I visited their church once, and I learned they were building a new sanctuary closer to the Washington, D.C. line in a higher crime, higher drug rate area, because they thought it was part of their ministry to change the lives of the people who needed them.

The second thing I want to say is that once Reverend Cherry was at a meeting at the White House with some other religious leaders, and he left early to go back to his church to minister to 150 couples that he had brought back to his church from all over America to convince them to come back together to save their marriages and to raise their kids. This is the kind of work that citizens are doing in America. We need more of it, and it ought to be lifted up and supported.

The last person I want to introduce is Jack Lucas from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Jack, would you stand up?

Fifty years ago, in the sands of Iwo Jima, Jack Lucas taught and learned the lessons of citizenship. On February 20th, 1945, he and three of his buddies encountered the enemy and two grenades at their feet. Jack Lucas threw himself on both of them.

In that moment, he saved the lives of his companions and miraculously, in the next instant a medic saved his life.