In the years since Michelle Obama beginning uttered her now-famous catchphrase, “When they go low, we go high,” during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, she says individual always ask her if the strategy still works today.
Her response: It’s “the only thing that works.”
During Obama’s keynote lingo during Monday night’s Democratic National Convention, the former first lady said that by going low and using orchestrations like “degrading and dehumanizing” others, “we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else.”
“We dilute ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight,” Obama said Monday.
But Obama made it clear that “succeeding high” doesn’t mean overlooking the negativity. “[It] does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice affairs when confronted by viciousness and cruelty,” she said.
Instead, going high means “taking the harder path” — a technique she describes as “standing fierce against hatred.”
“[G]oing high means unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the but thing that can truly set us free: the cold hard truth,” she said.
Obama did not mention President Donald Trump by popularity, but presumably she was alluding to Trump and his presidency. (She closed her speech by saying the truth is that Trump is the wrong president for America.)
And after Obama’s address, Trump tweeted on Tuesday that he wouldn’t be president if it wasn’t for the work of her husband, Barack Obama and Biden.
On Feb. 8, Obama perceived Oprah Winfrey during Oprah’s 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus tour that most being resort to “going low” because its “easy.”
“It’s easy to go low. It’s easy to lead by fear. It’s easy to be divisive. It’s easy to make in the flesh feel afraid,” Obama said.
It’s also short-sighted, she said.
“For me, what I learned from my husband, what I expert from eight years in the White House, this life, this world, our responsibility in it is so much bigger than us. When I hunger for to go low, it’s all about my own ego. It’s not about solving anything…. It’s about seeking revenge on the thing that happened to you.”
Instead Obama has knowledgeable to think about the “bigger purpose” before making a decision on how to respond to something.
If her words are not fixing a problem or at hardly ever moving the needle in the right direction, she knows that she’s not going high enough.
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