You can't really move forward if you don't heal the past and identify and address the fact that you had a problem and in some cases still have issues. That has to be dealt with.
The majority of people who come to America come to America for a better life for their family.
I truly do live my life a day at a time. When I talk to people trying to get through anything, it's a day at a time. If people stop to think, "It's going to be potentially three years and 10 months for the new president to come in," that's a very long time and that can have major effects on somebody's psyche. But if you take this thing a day at a time, and break it down a little differently, and do what you can do today, it will make it easier for people to move forward, and it makes it easier for me to move forward.
Even though we all might have differences, there's commonality in the sense [that] people are hard-working, people want to raise a family, people want to put a roof over their head, people want to put food on their table, people want good things for their children.
In Boston, our strength is really our diversity.
I'm personally asking each and every single Boston resident to look after their neighbor.
I know from my own life that you can’t move forward unless you reach out and deal honestly with the past. The truth is that when it comes to race and class, Boston has a lot of unfinished business. We must not be afraid to talk about it.
There's probably never been a more important time for mayors in America than there is right now in this country, because the people who are being targeted, and the fear that's happening out there, those people live in our cities.
I am the mayor of Boston, I am a Democrat. But, I am not the mayor of Democratic people in Boston. I am the mayor of Democrats and Republicans, Independents, Tea Party, and the unenrolled. I am the mayor of conservatives and progressives. I am the mayor of all the different races. I am the mayor of the rich and the poor.
Education is the lifeline of the city of Boston in a lot of ways, as far as preparing and educating young people for the future. So when we think about that - I would love to have the $25 million dollar investment we made up to close the gap on charter schools. I'd love to make that investment in a different part of the school system if we could. The money that we're trying to adjust on transportation, I would love to, if we can save money in transportation - that's not going to be a savings, that's going to come into the general fund, that's going to be reinvested in the school.
That's what American values and ideals are all about: We can come here and be different and celebrate different faiths and be OK with that.
As a mayor, I don't make my decisions based upon whether it is a "Democrat" issue. You make your decisions based upon the people you represent as a city to move our city forward.
The Affordable Care Act is a huge problem. [Repealing the ACA is] going to have huge implications. We have millennials that live in Boston that are on their parents' health insurance. The businesses have hired them and have been able to hire more people because they have been able to be on their own health insurance. We have seniors in our city who have preexisting conditions, or something called a "donut hole," which is a prescription drug [gap] in Medicare. Whatever changes they make could have detrimental effects on people's health care, but also on the economy.
When you go to urban America and you look at cities around America. People are moving back into the cities at record numbers. In the 1980s it was a flight to the suburbs. And now in 2017, it's a flight back into the cities.
The Boston's government approves housing projects every month and we're constantly approving opportunities to build more housing. And Boston is one of the hottest cities in America where people want to live. And it's important that we continue to build this housing and to keep up with the demand that we have in the communities.
Clearly, I think that there have been racial problems in America for a long time. I still think that, particularly during the second half of the Obama presidency, there has been a lot of emotion, a lot of feeling stirred up.
The majority of people who come to America come for a better life, just like the Italians, the Jews, the Irish, and the Polish did in generations before. A lot of the Irish came here back in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century because there were no opportunities and no options at home for them. There were no jobs and there was extreme poverty. They came here to be able to send money back home.
The millennial that lives in a very red state might not even realize that their congressman thinks that they have no constituents that feel the opposite of what the president or they are doing. This is the time to step up and push back.
