It is work. It is work in the broader sense. in the sense that this is an impulse that drove so many of our parents and grandparents and great grandparents before them to come to this country. Not just. of course. the dream of political freedom which impelled millions of Americans--millionsto emigrate to America. but the dream of economic opportunity. the understanding of people who came from feudal. oligarchic. unfair economic systems where they had no opportunity that America was the country where. if you worked hard. there was nothing you could not achieve. The welfare system seems to have turned this on its head. motivated by good intentions. charitable intentions at the outset. and created a system that does not encourage work. that seems at times to reward the opposite. and that offends the great majority of people who are out there. working hard. who. too often in the last decade or two. do not see their standard of living going up but do see themselves paying large tax bills and believe in their minds. understandably. that a lot of that money they worked hard for goes to people who are not working as hard. not reflecting the values of work in this country. Family. in this society and other societies. the core unit. the basic. primal sense of responsibility. the kind of natural division of familial labor between man and woman. mother and father. is destroyed in our society in numbers. as the Senator from New York has pointed out. that we do not findI have heard him say thisin other societies.
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emigrate