Thank you for having me here today.
            As you all know, we have a political campaign going on here in New York with an election in a few weeks. And until this week, most of us were focused on New York’s problems and our City’s road ahead.
I’ve spent the last few months going to every borough, all across New York City talking to everybody I can, at churches, at schools, about a shared vision of what our City could be.
    I’ve talked about how hard it is to make it, how expensive this City is. How we need to improve our schools, make them safe places for our kids to learn, lower taxes so people can afford essentials including housing, and I’ve offered ideas so more people who can’t afford health insurance can get it.
    I’ve given speeches about how City Hall should work in greater coordination with communities of faith, increasing pay for teachers, creating jobs and economic growth – issues that would make New York City better for us all.
But today I want to talk briefly about something that goes beyond our City – because what happened in New Orleans this week held up a mirror for our nation, and now I believe we have a choice. A choice about how we will go forward as a country.
            First, let’s face reality.
Everyone here has seen the terrible pictures on television and been filled with a sense of dread, a feeling in the pit of their stomach like being sick.  We want to say the pictures we’ve seen are unbelievable – like something out of a science fiction movie about the coming of the apocalypse.
            But they’re real.  Those pictures expose a reality many Americans assumed was impossible during this day in age.
But the clear fact is in America, when this crisis hit, some people were left behind.
The poorest, the sickest, the elderly – the people with the least power.
That is a reality that many in America didn’t believe could be true.
Mother’s begging for water for their babies, the dead and dying left unattended, thousands crammed into uncivilized conditions – refugees without hope here in America.
It would have been a horror to see such scenes on a broadcast from overseas.  But until this week, many thought it could never happen here in the United States.  Not now.  Not in the modern age.
The men, women, and children left to suffer in New Orleans represent a forgotten corner of our society.  Those left to fend for themselves, unable to escape the storm have been ignored by the nation during our time of plenty, and are now being pitied during their time of need.
That’s not who we’re supposed to be.  It should not take stories of teenage girls raped in putrid bathrooms, murders in pitch black caverns, and meals served in human excrement to get this nation to question how it can be that in the world’s most prosperous society, we have left our most vulnerable citizens to wait for days to be rescued from a city almost completely destroyed by Mother Nature.
But we must face the reality that this happened.
            The night that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Robert Kennedy addressed a crowd in Indianapolis.  He asked a question:  
“On this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.”
I believe we have a choice about our future.
Let me describe that choice. One side has argued that government is usually the problem – that government gets in the way and people should be able to look out for themselves. That people need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. And that the federal government isn’t needed very often. The other side, at its best, says we are in this together. That you don’t just say we won’t leave people behind – you really mean it. And that government is a necessary tool sometimes for ensuring safety and opportunity.  
America will have to ask if we’ve made the right choices in the last few years.
I believe the nation has fallen into a dangerous sort of complacency.  Too many accepted that it was possible to slash programs and give windfalls to the rich, and there would be no consequences. That we could ignore cities, and that the most vulnerable would not suffer.  That we could rely on someone other than our national government, our federal government, to be ready in times of domestic crisis.
Sometimes, tragedy is a wake up call reminding us that we still have a long way to go.
It’s time for us to re-examine the choices and priorities made each year in Washington and in the White House, and ask whether they reflect our deepest values as a nation.
Hopefully, after this week we will have an inquiry into how badly this response was handled. But we will also have a debate over what type of philosophy will be at the heart of America’s future. What kind of future we will choose.
One of the reasons I became involved in politics and public service is because I am an optimist. I believe we can work together, and that government can be a vehicle to make things better for all of us. I believe that we are each better off as individuals when there is more opportunity, more safety, more security, more prosperity for all of us.
I believe that we each have rights as individuals and responsibilities as citizens.  And that government can be a tool for fighting for the most vulnerable. This week, government failed the least powerful people, and I believe we are all weaker for it.
I think America saw an awful vision of what the future could be this week. And I hope out of that there will be a new commitment. A commitment to fight for those who are still left behind and for a national government that is effective and active when crisis strikes.  And I hope there will be a new commitment to the idea that we are stronger together than apart, and to the ideal of a country that never again leaves the most vulnerable Americans behind.