John Lennon’s childhood was deeply marked by tragedy, to the point where a distraught John was asked to choose to between living with either his mother or his father. He chose his mother, but in the end, he lost them both: his mother was killed by a drunk driver when John was 16, he didn’t see his father again until he was 21
In a searing song called Mother written by Lennon after the Beatles split, Lennon wrote ‘Mother, you had me but I never had you, I wanted you but you didn’t want me…Father, you left me but I never left you, I needed you but you didn’t need me’. Mother is a song that could be the anthem of abandoned children everywhere. It is a song that could easily have been written for Lennon’s first son, Julian, who also saw very little of his troubled father.
For a man who professed not to believe in God, Lennon talked and wrote a lot about Him. He said that ‘God is a concept by which we measure our pain’, he said that the Beatles were ‘more poular than Jesus’, he said ‘imagine there’s no heaven..no hell below us, above us only sky’. He said ‘all you need is love’.

President Obama needs to realize he is a 50 year old man, not a 50 year old college adolescent. His needs to grow up and realize he has a very important job to do to lead this country, but his lack of leadership has hurt America. He fails to realize America is a Democratic Constitutional Republic, not a big government welfare state. He wrongly thinks that to grow the economy, you need to grow government when in fact, quite the opposite is true. A good leader will try to instill hope, pride and security for the people not blame, fear and despair like he is doing. He has divided this country to the brink of destruction with his class warfare. He didn’t surround himself with top knotch knowledgeable advisors either, which a smart president would do. Most Americans know that hard work and diligence pays off. It’s the American way and has been for two centuries.This president never even had a real job and has no clue what it means to work hard and prosper. He is anti-business and knows nothing of the private sector, he hardly even acknowledges it exists. Never had to balance a budget or live within a budget. I don’t think he realizes this is a consumer driven economy. The private sector is what will get us out of this. You need to put money in the hands of the consumer, not tax him to death. This is how you spread the wealth and help the economy. President Obama lacks experience and is in way over his head and will not recover. If you voted for him to show you are not prejudice, don’t voted for him again and show you are ignorant. Americans need to take this country back in 2012.

…Each generation is critical of its predecessor. As the day nears when classroom and playing field must give way to the larger arena with its problems of inequality and human misunderstanding, it is easy to look at those in that arena and demand to know why the problems remain unsolved. We who preceded you asked that question of those who preceded us and another younger generation will ask it of you.

I hope there will be less justification for the question when it is your turn to answer. What I am trying to say is that no generation has failed completely, nor will yours succeed completely. …

…Are the problems of urban ghettoes and poverty the result of selfishness on our part or indifference to suffering? No people in all the history of mankind have shared so widely its material resources.

We taxed ourselves more heavily and extended aid at home and abroad. And when the problems grew, we planned more and passed more legislation to add to the scores of programs, until today, they are listed in government catalogues of hundreds of pages. We who are called materialist have tried to solve human problems with material means. We have forgotten man’s spiritual heritage; we have placed security above freedom and confused the citizen’s responsibility to society with society’s responsibility to the individual.

We have to re-study some of our social legislation, legislation that meant well, but has failed in its goals or has created greater problems than the ones it was meant to cure.

We have to re-examine our individual goals and aims.

What do we want for ourselves and our children? Is it enough to have material things? Aren’t liberty and morality and integrity and high principles and a sense of responsibility more important?

The world’s truly great thinkers have not pointed us toward materialism; they have dealt with the great truths and with the high questions of right and wrong, of morality and of integrity.

They have dealt with the question of man, not the acquisition of things. And when civilizations have disregarded their findings, when they have turned to the things of the flesh, they have disappeared.

You are concerned with us and what seems to be hypocrisy and lack of purpose on our part. And we in turn are concerned about you, seeing a rising spirit of unrest, aimlessness, and drifting, a feeling of rebellion without a real cause that results sometimes in meaningless but violent actions. …

…You are needed; we need your courage, your idealism, your new and untried viewpoint. You know more than we did at your age; you are brighter, better informed, even healthier. And because human kind is vertically structured, we can take a little credit for that. But, you want a purpose, a cause, a banner to follow, and we owe you that. …

…Our national purpose is to unleash the full talent and genius of the individual, not to create mass movements with the citizenry subjecting themselves to the whims of the state. Here, as nowhere in the world, we are established to provide the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order. …

…You want a purpose, something to believe in? You might try resolving that you will contribute something to generations unborn—a handhold above your own achievement so that another generation can climb higher and achieve more.

This library is more than a beautiful and functional building. It is first and foremost a repository of knowledge and culture. More facts will be available in this one library than were available in all the libraries of the world a hundred years ago.

That shouldn’t surprise you.

Man’s knowledge has increased at such a rapid rate since the turn of the century that any book of facts written then would be obsolete now, both in terms of what we know to be true and also what we know to be true no longer.

But a library is more than just a place to go for facts. A library is also a place to go for wisdom. And the purpose of an educational institution is to teach not only knowledge, but also wisdom.

Someone once said that people who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on buses and subways.

In a way, that may be true.

But to understand democracy is not necessarily to solve its problems.

And I would venture to say Aristotle, and those others whom you will find not in the buses and subways, but instead in this building here, will give you more answers and more clues to the solutions of our problems than you are likely to find on the buses and subways.

Maybe the best answer is to be found in both, but do not let the library go to waste because you are awaiting the completion of Eureka’s first subway.

Now, when I suggest that we turn to books, to the accumulated knowledge of the past, I am not suggesting that we turn back the clock or retreat into some dim yesterday that we remember only with nostalgia, if at all. But we must learn from yesterday to have a better tomorrow.

We are beset by problems in a complex world; we are confused by those who tell us only new and untried ways offer hope. The answers to all the problems of mankind will be found in this building by those who have the desire to find them and perception enough to recognize them.

There will be the knowledge of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, and from the vantage point of history, their mistakes. We can look back and see where pure democracy became as dictatorial as a sultan and majority rule without protection for the minority became mob rule.

One of mankind’s problems is that we keep repeating the same errors. For every generation some place, two plus two has added up to three, or in another place, five—four seems to elude some of us. This has happened in my generation and I predict, without smugness, it will happen to yours. …

…Do you doubt the answers can be found here? From the eleventh century, Maimonides, Hebrew philosopher and physician, will give you the eight steps in helping the needy to help themselves.

Can you name one problem that would not be solved if we had simply followed the teachings of the man from Galilee? We can redirect our nation’s course into the paths of freedom and morality and high principle.

And, in so directing it, we can build better lives for ourselves and our children and a better nation for those who come after us, or we can ignore history and go the way of Greece and Rome.

I think that this is the significance of this library. The fact that we can use it to re-chart our course, not into the great unknown, but onto paths that are clear and which, if followed, can show us how to cope with the new problems that always confront each generation and can lead us, as a people, on to continued greatness. …