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Barack Obama Was Right: The World is Messy and People Are Complicated
What President Obama said in 2019 is still relevant in 2024
At the 2019 annual summit for the Obama Foundation, the 44th President of the United States made headlines for criticizing call-out culture. He was right. It’s now 2024, and he’s still right.
It should be noted that his remarks were not intended as a repudiation of or reversal of his core left-of-center beliefs or convictions, but he was offering a critique of some of what has characterized the socio-cultural-political “woke” left in the 21st century.
He told the mostly young audience that people need to “get over” the idea that they are “always woke” and always “pure.” Obama reminded them of what people long considered obvious, which is that the “world is messy” and “there are ambiguities.”
He pointed out that “people who do really good stuff have flaws.” Again, this is something that Americans — for pretty much their entire history — understood as common sense. It’s why the vast majority of…
