I want to tell them that our country has endured a great deal of national trauma, probably more than enough in any lifetime. I believe I can appreciate the depths of their disillusionment with those who governed and those who are governing our country. I want to tell the graduates today: The storybook vision of your country may have turned out flawed and ugly. But one never loves one’s land because of its virtues; one loves it despite its faults.
If you can accept the fact that your solutions, too, in the future could be incomplete, and yet not let that possibility, that fear, paralyze you into inaction and indifference, you may still be able to achieve a better, if still imperfect, world. This is a far more modest wish than the traditional command of a commencement speaker to go out and save the world. But it is my wish for you, the graduates, and it is an honest one.
There is a gentle revolution that you’ve got to get involved in – one that springs from the imperative need to bring imagination, tenderness, and human compassion to bear in the sectors of our country where they have been denied access. The people in this revolution will not be asking where the jobs are, they will be asking where the need is. Not piously, not as missionaries, but for reasons of self-fulfillment.
But you must confront your environment with courage and rationality, or it will destroy you. Do not turn away from injustice. Know the limitations of your country and yourself, but do not give up. Do not stop believing you can make a difference. Care!
You and I live in an age where men have walked on the moon, harnessed the vast power of nuclear energy, and are tackling the amazing complexities of the digital age. We also live in our own world of sin and corruption, greed and betrayal, and disgusting violations of truth that cannot help but stymie the decent, where the phrase "the rule of law" is subjected to ridiculous blasphemy almost every day of our lives.
The result can be seen today in our nation where extremes of wealth and poverty jostle each other in fear and loathing. Many of us preach the sermon of greed and indifference. We appear to have forgotten the Sermon on the Mount.
If we have no memories, if we do not learn that evil is born and thrives in direct proportion to our own indifference to it, if we slumber in apathy or are poisoned by irrational thinking, if fear rather than reason is our only catalyst, then the dark will indeed continue to be upon the face of our world.
I’ve been hearing an oft-repeated phrase for some time now: "the silent majority." What an obscene phrase in an open society. To be silent is to be dead! The silent majority hides under headstones. To be alive is to be kicking. You know that phrase old folks say: "I am still alive and kicking." It isn’t accidental. Much of folklore is based on truth. When a mother has a child inside her belly and she feels it kicking, she knows something is alive and about to be born.
Where there is silence, there is terror. Silence is what the Germans of the ’30s experienced, and what followed was inevitable. "Through our great good fortune, in our youth, our hearts were touched with fire." Oliver Wendell Holmes said that, and now I’d like to tell you – not only for your own benefit but for my own – that "fire" is only the start. To keep it there throughout a lifetime is what is crucial.
I once told a graduating class where I was the commencement speaker that college freshmen wander around holding their umbilical cords looking for some place to plug them in. You are not freshmen now, and there isn’t going to be another freshman year for you as there was when you graduated from high school. This is different. There’s no plug for the cord; the apron strings are finally cut and you’re graduating as whole people. The problem is that a lot of people you’re going to encounter in the next few months and years are not going to be whole – they’re going to be broken, and I’m asking you who have been given the opportunity to graduate from college to be menders, to heal the brokenness of your generation, and of the older generation who have grown apathetic to corruption of a magnitude and brazenness that rocks and shocks, to the abhorrent greed of the powerful, and the abrasive resort to transgressions of a bill of rights that remains enshrined in our constitution and our hearts.
We are beginning to develop an enormous cultural passivity. We spend so much of our time and attention as spectators, viewers, listeners – part of a vast, faceless audience. That can bring excitement, emotion, and entertainment, but it makes for a synthetic kind of existence. Without personal participation, a sense of reality fades away, and then it becomes hard to identify values, set priorities, and to think and feel with any depth.
Taking part, whether it’s doing something alone or together with others, especially where the life of your country is at stake, generates the enthusiasm and the fulfillment a human being needs, instead of just waiting to take what comes, fearful to take action and stand for one’s convictions, comfortably ensconced in your fence-sitter’s chair.
What we need are men and women who will dare to break the mold of tired thinking – who just won’t buy somebody saying, "We’ve always done it this way. There really is no alternative."
When you get fatigued, when you are frustrated because you are shackled, not redeemed by your best hopes, the tension between perfectability and fallibility will break you apart, and you will share only a desire to lie low. Let me tell you that this is not the time to lie low.
By the way, I grew up thinking that some people – the famous, the strong, the caring, the dedicated, the involved – were somehow inherently better than I was. I grew up thinking they were smarter, or wittier, or luckier than I ever thought I would be. Instead, what I learned was that those who influenced my world and will, I hope, influence yours, do so because they want to, and because they dared to try.
But ultimately, they make a decision to be more than just a spectator in life, because they have "graduated" to more than that. What you will find is that being involved means taking some hits from people who sing hosannahs to your principles until those principles collide with their backdoor. They’ll tell you honesty’s great until you tell them an unpleasant truth. They’ll applaud your courage until it creates discomfort for them. They’ll salute your loyalty until it’s mistaken for acceptance of anything they do, and they will praise your pride until it outdistances their own.
Get involved. Be committed. "Graduate" to all of that, and ultimately the small, the ignorant, the petty will try to reduce you in size. It’s not a pleasant prospect but I guarantee it’s more attractive than joining their ranks without ever coming to bat. You’ve got to live a life with a purpose beyond yourself, and you’ll find that the world is as bold and as broad as you will make it. Live it only for yourself and its limits will always be at arm’s length. You will find out how empty a fair-weather life eventually proves to be. It is a myth that the sum of your talents is equal to the sum of your paycheck. Talent, like success, is what you define it to be. Excellence is doing your best at what you do best. And remember how true it is that there is no body of professional expertise and no anthology of case studies that can help you achieve excellence except the force of moral character.
For in the final analysis, it is your moral compass that counts far more than any bank balance, any resume, and yes, any diploma. A Jesuit retreat master once told me that we must seek "the integrity of mind that money cannot buy; the humility in the face of the facts that self-esteem cannot corrupt." Put more crudely, where you stand should not depend on where you sit.
This is your time. Since life is our most precious gift, and since it is given to us to live but once, let us live so we will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia. Your challenge is to be our conscience, to keep the drumbeat of activism alive, to rouse those who have become too comfortable for the struggle and reinvigorate those too tired to fight. And in living your lives, each of you must say: "All my conscious life and energies are being devoted to the most noble cause in the world – the liberation of the human mind and spirit, beginning with my own."