Community

My first babysitter was the Reverend Noah Albert Cleaver, my great-grandfather. He took care of my oldest sister and me every day after preschool. He lived to be 103 years old. I was in college when he died. He was born in Cherokee County, Texas, and he died in Ellis County, Texas. He never voted, not one time in 103 years. Because if he wanted to vote, he had to pay $3.50 in a poll tax. And that was a lot of money back then.

A Helping Hand

When I look back to how my family got to where we are now, it was the help we received from the government, living in public housing, for six years, until my father could save enough money to buy a home. There are tens of thousands of other stories, just like that, where people needed a helping hand, received a helping hand, and now they use their time to extend that hand to help others.

I was forty-five years old when the World Wide Web was invented in 1989. Up until the year 2000, my family did not have a personal computer, or a connection to the Internet. We picked up the phone or we sent a letter in the mail. These days, you can barely get by without it. I have a smartphone in my pocket, an iPad at home, and a desktop PC at both of my offices. Now, I still write my speeches out longhand. But when I need to change my health insurance, read the news, or listen to music, I sit down at my desk and get on the Internet.

Missouri's Fifth District is what I like to call a microcosm of our country. Our urban and rural communities depend on and derive strength from one another in a symbiotic, beneficial relationship. We have a vibrant city center so cool that the Huffington Post named it the coolest city in America. We have abundant farmland where our farmers grow soybeans and corn, and ranchers tend livestock. We have beautiful and welcoming suburbs where families flourish.