Commencement 2007
"I see you"
Excerpts from the Class Day address, on June 6, by Bill Clinton, forty-second president of the United States. Clinton discussed the comedians who had preceded him in recent years, and the serious speakers—Martin Luther King Jr., invited to speak in 1968 but murdered before he could address the class, whose widow, Coretta Scott King, spoke in his place; Mother Teresa; and Bono—who had also been chosen to speak.
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Bill Clinton
What do they all have in common? They are symbols of our common humanity and a rebuke even to humorists’ cynicism. Martin Luther King basically said he lived the way he did because we were all caught in what he called an inescapable web of mutuality. Nelson Mandela, the world’s greatest living example of that, I believe, comes from a tribe in South Africa, the Xhosa, who call it ubuntu. In English, “I am because you are.” That led Mother Teresa from Albania to spend her life with the poorest people on earth in Calcutta. It led Bono from his rock stage to worry about innocent babies dying of AIDS, and poor people with good minds who never got a chance to follow their dreams.…
[J]ust think what an exciting time it is. All this explosion of knowledge.…
It’s also exciting because of all the diversity. If you look around this audience…I wonder how different this crowd would have looked…30 years ago. And how much more interesting it is for all of us.
It’s a frustrating time, because for all the opportunity, there’s a lot of inequality. There’s a lot of insecurity and there’s a lot of instability and unsustainability. Half the world’s people still live on less than two bucks a day. A billion on less than a dollar a day. A billion people go to bed hungry tonight. A billion people won’t get a clean glass of water today or any day in their lives. One in four of all the people who die this year will die from AIDS, TB, malaria, and infections related to dirty water. Nobody in America dies of any of that except people whose AIDS medicine doesn’t work anymore, or people who decline to follow the prescribed regime.…
It’s an uncertain, insecure time because we’re all vulnerable to terror, to weapons of mass destruction, to global pandemics like avian influenza.…You all saw it this week in all of the stories about the terrorist attack being thwarted in Kennedy [International] Airport [ in New York].…
But…[t]he inequality is fixable and the insecurity is manageable. We’re going to really have to go some in the twenty-first century to see political violence claim as many innocent lives as it did in the twentieth century.…The difference is, you think it could be you this time, because of the interdependence of the world. So yes, it’s insecure, but it’s manageable.
It’s also an unsustainable world because of climate change, resource depletion, and the fact that between now and 2050, the world’s supposed to grow from six and a half to nine billion people, with most of the growth in the countries least able to handle it….That’s all fixable, too. So is climate change a problem? Is resource depletion a problem? Is poverty and the fact that 130 million kids never go to school and all this disease that I work on a problem? You bet it is.
But I believe the most important problem is the way people think about it and each other, and themselves. The world is awash today in political, religious, almost psychological conflicts, which require us to divide up and demonize people who aren’t us. And every one of them in one way or the other is premised on a very simple idea. That our differences are more important than our common humanity.
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