Word: cuomo
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...have been there this past Monday night when former New York Governor Mario Cuomo came to speak at the Kennedy School of Government. But the lucky 1500 or so Harvard affiliates and Boston residents who came to hear had the rare privilege of seeing Mario Cuomo cry--twice...
...Mario Cuomo, the longest-serving governor of New York in modern history, stood in front of 1500 people and cried twice. Not bawling out loud, of course. A person who held the same office held by both presidential Roosevelts tends to make an effort to avoid sobbing during a speech. But the tears in his eyes and in his voice were obvious twice, visible and audible even in the adjacent rooms on Simulcast. No matter what you might think of Cuomo, or even if you couldn't care less about Cuomo, you have to admit that it's kind...
...Cuomo spoke about how America has abandoned its poorest citizens. He evoked for his audience the much-vaunted 40 million working Americans who don't have health insurance, along with the millions of schoolchildren subsisting on a sub-par education, in an era when we are faced with not only a booming economy but an actual budget surplus, an era when prosperity should have rendered these problems moot. Nothing in his speech was new; none of his statistics were shocking. Democrats in the audience surely agreed with most of Cuomo's ideas; Republicans, predictably, would have loved to debate...
Perhaps what America needs, Cuomo suggested, is some kind of hero, a redemptive figure who would emerge onto the American scene and bring us the solutions that seem just outside our grasp. "Moses," he mused, "maybe if Moses came back...even Alan Simpson here wouldn't argue with Moses...
Ultimately, though, Cuomo's verdict on heroism was more negative. "I don't think we can have heroes anymore," he told his audience. "The ground is too hard for heroes to grow." The audience was then left to ask itself: Where have all the heroes gone? And why can't we, at one of the centers of our great nation's power, generate more of them? Many of us students think that we ourselves are the seeds of future heroes. In truth, we are actually part of the hard-packed ground. We are either too cynical to believe that real...