The Anti-Trump

Rest assured our current president never uttered these words:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered them in his 1941 State of the Union Address, more commonly known as the Four Freedoms speech.

A far cry from "American carnage," no? 

FDR's naiveté, okay hopefulness, is inscribed on a memorial on---where else?--Roosevelt Island.   

Two angled lines of little leaf linden trees point to the enlarged bust.

It sits at their apex, just in front of an open area that looks out toward the Statue of Liberty.

In a nice bit of architectural irony, the United Nations looms to the west.

Designed by Louis I. Kahn nearly fifty years ago, the memorial is built of granite on landfill. Superstorm Sandy left it unscathed, shortly after the 2012 dedication. Kahn never knew. He died in 1974.