The West Wing, Season Four

C.J.:
My name is C.J. Cregg. As you know, I work for the President of the United States. This is why I was asked to make a short speech for our reunion. It's a terrible subject, a terrible idea: The Promise of a Generation. So bad I was going to start off with a joke and fill the whole thing in with more jokes. But I find the topic has gotten under my skin while I wasn't paying attention because every generation has promise and every generation fails that promise in some respects. How can we not? What is promise if not something that's impossible to live up to? My boss had to recently make his case to the American people that he was worth reelecting and it was not an easy process --- nor should it be. And in its wake I've been thinking a lot about civility, civic duty and kindness, and how pervasive and powerful they are. How enduringly pervasive those qualities are in American life and how I see them all around me day after day. America's a terribly difficult idea filled with promise and impossible to live up to. Promise is inchoate and promise is what binds us. Some of us died, some got sick, some got rich, some had bad luck, some of us were fortunate, more than others. But failed promise only truly fails when it leads to lowered expectation.