04-11-2012 Mayor Pete Buttigieg State of the City of South Bend

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SpU TH 8F � G z s 1865 CITY OF SOUTH BEND PETE BUTTIGIEG, MAYOR OFFICE OF THE MAYOR • Unity through diversity comes by way of a two-way street. We need diverse perspectives in government and in leadership. And we need to ensure that we reach out to different corners of our community. • We do this not just to check boxes or to make ourselves feel better about ourselves, but because we have so much to learn from each other, so much to teach each other. • It would be naive to think that our community or any community can wipe away the differences between us or to think that by better understanding each other, disagreements will all melt away. • But unity is not about everyone agreeing on every issue or every decision. No two people will ever agree on absolutely everything. Democracy itself rests on the wisdom of knowing that total sameness of thought is not possible,nor is it desirable. • Unity through diversity, in my view, is about understanding our differences, learning from them, and remembering what is worth more to us than our individual agendas. It's about understanding where others in our community are coming from, and being willing to set aside personal and factional priorities in the service of a bigger vision of what we all could become, if and only if we all work together on getting there. • For citizens, that can mean allowing one priority to wait while we all pull together on another one with wider impact. • For elected leaders like me, it means placing the city's interest ahead of our own, ahead of pet projects, and ahead of the desire to be popular. It means seeing something bigger than one organization, one constituency, one district, one interest group. 1400 COUNTY-CITY BUILDING•227 W.IEFFERSON BOULEVARD•SOUTH BEND,INDIANA 46601 PHONE 574/235-9261• FAx 574/235-9892