MY SAY: SENATOR ROBERT DOLE’S ACCEPTANCE SPEECH AT THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION ON AUGUST 15, 1996
https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/conventions/san.diego/transcripts/0815/dole.fdch.shtml
When the late Senator Bob Dole accepted the nomination at the Republican National Convention on August 15, 1996, he delivered a most eloquent speech touching on every issue that engages us today. Take the time to read it all at the site. Rest in peace Senator Dole. rsk
EXCERPTS
And who am I that stands before you tonight?
I was born in Russell, Kansas, a small town in the middle of the prairie surrounded by wheat and oil wells.
And the first thing you learn on the prairie is the relative size of a man compared to the lay of the land. And under the immense sky where I was born and raised, a man is very small, and if he thinks otherwise, he is wrong.
Let me be the bridge to an America than only the unknowing call myth. Let me be the bridge to a time of tranquility, faith and confidence in action.
And to those who say it was never so, that America’s not been better, I say you’re wrong. And I know because I was there. And I have seen it. And I remember.
And our nation, though wounded and scathed, has outlasted revolutions, civil war, world war, racial oppression and economic catastrophe. We have fought and prevailed on almost every continent. And in almost every sea.
We have even lost. But we have lasted, and we have always come through.
And what enabled us to accomplish this has little to do with the values of the present. After decades of assault upon what made America great, upon supposedly obsolete values, what have we reaped? What have we created? What do we have?
I am here to say to America, do not abandon the great traditions that stretch to the dawn of our history. Do not topple the pillars of those beliefs — God, family, honor, duty, country — that have brought us through time, and time, and time, and time again.
The war(WW) was fought just a generation after America’s greatest and most intense period of immigration. And yet when the blood of the sons of immigrants and the grandsons of slaves fell on foreign fields, it was American blood. In it you could not read the ethnic particulars of the soldier who died next to you. He was an American.
And when I think how we learned this lesson I wonder how we could have unlearned it. Is the principle of unity, so hard-fought and at the cost of so many lives, having been contested again and again in our history, and at such a terrible price, to be casually abandoned to the urge to divide?
And so tonight I call on every American to rise above all that may divide us, and to defend the unity of the nation for the honor of generations past, and the sake of those to come.
And when I look back on my life, I see less and less of myself and more and more a history of this civilization that we have made that is called America.
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