Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime of Minister of Canada ｜ 2023 Northeastern University Graduate Speech
Episode Stats
Words per minute
109.25197
Summary
Learn English with Michelle Obama. Michelle Obama is the first woman to become Prime Minister of the United States of America. She is also a former US Vice President, and served as the first female prime minister of her country, New York City.
Transcript
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Our time of tranquility is over and we are living in an age of change.
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We're living through what President Biden, on a visit to my country in March, called an inflection
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point. A time of transformation, he said, that comes once every five or six generations. Now,
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like it or not, you are graduating into that inflection point. And as some of the very best
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educated people on our planet, you have the rare and precious opportunity to shape it.
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So what is this inflection point? What is this upheaval which is going to the roots of humanity
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itself? There are many ways to describe this transformational moment, but I think they all
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come down to one fundamental question. Does capitalist democracy still work?
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That's the question being posed around kitchen tables in my country and this one. As parents
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wonder if our children can count on capitalist democracy's essential promise of a future more
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prosperous than our present. It is the question being posed in the muddy and bloodied trenches
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of Bahamut as Ukraine's brave Democrats resist the invading forces of Putin's dictatorship.
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And it is the question being posed by our shrinking glaciers and our warming oceans,
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which are asking us, wordlessly but emphatically, if democratic societies can rise to the existential