President Barack Obama implored the 2013 graduating class of Ohio State University Sunday to reject the antigovernment conspiracy theories they hear in the media and in the nation's political discourse.
"Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems," Obama told more than 57,000 graduates, friends, and relatives on Sunday gathered at Ohio Stadium in Columbus, reports
Real Clear Politics.
"They'll warn," he added," that tyranny's always lurking just around the corner."
He urged the graduates to "reject these voices" because they suggest "that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted."
"We have never been a people who place all our faith in government to solve our problems," the president continued. "We shouldn't want to. But we don't think the government is the source of all our problems, either. Because we understand that this democracy is ours."
As citizens, he added, "We understand that it's not about what America can do for us, it's about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government."
The visit to Ohio State marked a return to where the president kicked off his 2012 re-election campaign and the first of three commencement addresses he plans to deliver this spring.
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