WHAT BILL CLINTON SAID
By Ed Barna
In my previous entry, I said there would be several regular sub-features of this column. One will be Word for Word.
On May 27, former President Bill Clinton delivered one of the finest commencement addresses the Middlebury College community has heard. This is my transcription from a recording. The text begins after introductory remarks recognizing college officials and the other honorary degree recipients. I have added brief explanatory material in parentheses at some point.
One unfamiliar word that Clinton used deserves closer attention: “ubutu,” a South African term that has been translated as “caring for others,” though Clinton gives a far better translation. In its country of orgin, the word is linked to the history of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that enabled the country to move on as a biracial society despite its history of apartheid. This is an explanation from the website www.truthcommissions.org .
“Archbishop Tutu was the driving force behind the commission’s work. He created the framework through which the work of the TRC was understood. He made little attempt to separate his work on the commission from his spiritual beliefs, often referred to as Ubuntu theology. Ubuntu is the traditional African notion “which affirms an organic wholeness of humanity, a wholeness realized in and through other people.” Desmond Tutu merged this traditional thought with Christian values of forgiveness, repentance and reconciliation. This ideology led to a subtle pressure on those who testified to forgive those who had committed crimes against them, as according to the ubutu ideology it was only through forgiveness and the recognition of the humanity of the wrongdoer that testifiers could fully reclaim their own humanity. The driving philosophy behind the TRC was the idea that “Reconciliation is only possible if we build on the foundation of truth. Amnesia may be comforting, but in the end it will prevent reconciliation rather than promoting it.” (Archbishop Tutu’s Pressclub speech, 21 October 1997).”
Here is Clinton’s address, which concerns world reconciliation:
“Sathyavani Sathisan (Class of 2007, the student-chosen speaker), you gave a great speech—and you look fine without your mortarboard, don’t worry about it. Let’s give her a big hand. (applause)
I would also like to acknowledge a person who served in my administration, as Ambassador to Switzerland, your former Governor, Madeleine Kunin is here. Thank you for being here.
And Middlebury’s ambassador in the White House when I was President, Andrew Friendly, who was my personal aide, thank you for being here today.
I’d like to thank Dick Fuld (a trustee) for asking me to come and speak at his son’s graduation (Richard Severin Fuld, economics, Greenwich, Connecticut).
But I want you to know, because this is really what my talk is about—and I can actually give it now, I was going to give a 30 second version if the rain hadn’t stopped—I want you to know that the first person who introduced me to Middlebury was Ron Brown, who was my Commerce Secretary, and who grew up on the streets of Harlem and found a home at Middlebury, and served on the board until his untimely death in 1996, as my Secretary of Commerce leading a delegation of Americans to the Balkans to try to help people put their lives together again after we ended the horrible civil war in Bosnia.
I loved Ron Brown. He was unbelievable, he was like a brother to me. But his eyes would just light up every time he talked about Middlebury. And I hope that all of you for the rest of your lives, however long they may be, will feel some of that.
Because I could see that he found here what I want for everyone in the world. A kid who grew up in a hotel in Harlem found a home here because there’s a community here, in the best sense. And that’s what we really have to build in the world.
Every successful community has three things, whether it’s a university, a sports team, a business, an orchestra, a family, you name it, they all have three things: a broadly shared opportunity to participate; a broadly felt responsibility for the success of the enterprise, whatever it is; and a genuine sense of belonging.
That’s what Ron Brown found at Middlebury, when he became the first African-American member of his fraternity, and his fraternity had to choose between kicking him out or being kicked out of the national fraternity, and they chose him. Good for you, by the way. (applause)
But look around here. This is a much more interesting student body than if I’d come here 30 years ago to speak. I mean it’s more diverse racially, religiously, you have 62 percent of you learned overseas, you’ve got students from 74 countries here, you’ve got a commencement speaker from Singapore of Indian heritage, you doubtless have Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, perhaps Shintos, Confucians, Jains—goodness knows what else (laughs). But you’re still in a community.
Now, the world has lots of problems. We have the existential problem of climate change—and you’re on the cutting edge of that. I congratulate you on your commitment to become carbon-neutral over the next few years. We have the problems of resource depletion all over the world: unprecedented loss of topsoil, water, trees, plant and animal species—and this at a time when the world’s population is expected to grow from six and a half billion to nine billion, almost all of it in countries least able to take care of themselves today—and only Brazil and Argentina have increased significantly grain production in the last 10 years, because they have more than 20 feet of topsoil.
That’s a huge problem. And for all the people down in Washington that are so exercised about the problem of illegal immigration, you ain’t seen nothing yet, if we go from six and a half billion to nine billion people on earth and our capacity to grow food is reduced, not increased.
We have legitimate problems with terror weapons of mass destruction and the potential spread of them, and our interdependence has made us even more vulnerable than we have been since the end of World War I to a global epidemic like avian influenza—which is why you can turn on the evening news and see stories—I have—in a little home town in New York where I live, I’ve seen just in the last few months on the evening news stories about chickens, competing with stories about Britney Spears’ shaved head (laughs) and the local crime story and the fight over the remains of poor Anna Nicole Smith, I’ve seen stories about chickens in Romania, India and Indonesia. Why? Because they all have avian influenza, it has a 60 percent mortality rate in people, and we don’t have a vaccine or a cure yet.
There are good stories, more important than the other ones. So we have problems there.
We have problems because the world that is now yours to command, with your imagination, is so beyond the reach of half the other people on this planet. Half the world’s people still live on less than $2 a day and a billion people on less than a dollar a day. A quarter of all deaths on Earth from AIDS, TB, malaria, infections related to dirty water—80 percent in the last category children under five.
And even within rich countries there’s a real struggle to maintain anything like a real sense of social cohesion, because inequality in American runs rampant. In the last…we’re now in the sixth year of an economic recovery, and we have a 40-year high in corporate profits to a record stock market, increasing productivity from people every year, but median wages are flat and poverty and the lack of health insurance have both gone up among working families—because we’ve become more unequal.
So there are plenty of problems out there. Why would I come and ask you to think most community?
Because I believe questions of community and identity, personal identity, will determine our collective capacity to deal with all the problems. The most important thing you’ve got coming out of this Middlebury education is the understanding of the elemental value that makes all communities possible in an interdependent world: which is, that our differences are really neat. They make life more interesting, and they aid in the search for truth.
But our common humanity matters more. So much of the world’s difficulty today is rooted in the rejection of that simple premise. You think about all the political, the religious, almost psychological fundamentalism that drives the wars and the conflicts and the demonization in the world today—ALL of it is premised on the simple fact that our differences are more important than whatever we could have in common.
When the terrorism bombings hit London not so long ago, the most traumatic for many British citizens was that the people who set the bombs off were British citizens. There was in no sense an invasion. They felt somehow violated and disoriented. And I read painful article after article where people were saying, “I just don’t get it. I work with these people. They’re nice people. I don’t understand it. I’ve played with their children, and we went to sporting events on the weekend,” or whatever. “We had all this contact. What happened?”
The people who set the bombs off did not feel they belonged. They believed that their differences were more important than what they had in common. And so even though they worked and sometimes played with other people, they became less human to them.
All this may seem completely alien to you. But we are all guilty, at various points, of doing the same thing.
I’ll give you a little test. The most important thing that I think came out of the stunning sequencing of the human genome—in 2000, for me; it was a project I had strongly supported as President—and lots of wonderful things have happened, just last week we learned two genetic markers that are high predictors of diabetes, we found. This is a HUGE discovery, because of that rampant growth of diabetes, along with childhood obesity, in the United States. We have for the first time statistically significant numbers of young people with what we used to call “adult onset diabetes.”
A lot of great things have happened. We found the markers for breast cancer, we’re getting close with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. But the most important thing I learned was that genetically, all human beings are 99.9 percent the same.
Now that is astonishing. I mean, look at each other. Every difference you can see, of gender, skin color, hair color, eye color, height, weight, you name it—everything you can possibly observe about another that seems different—is rooted in one-tenth of one percent of your genetic makeup.
And yet, even most of us spend 90 percent of our time focused on the one-tenth of one percent—don’t we? I’m 60 years old—well, at least I’m not 80. (laughs) I’m 10 pounds overweight—well, at least I’m not 40 pounds overweight. I did a terrible thing—but at least I’m not as bad as she is. (much laughter). Or he is. How many times have you done that? (laughter still)
I met Rush Limbaugh the other night, in New York (continuing laughter) And I was tempted, after all the terrible things he said about me, to tell him we were 99.9 percent the same. (general laughter and applause) I was afraid the poor man would run weeping from the rest room. (more laughter) And so I let it go.
On the other hand, a few weeks from now I’m going to South Africa, as I try to go every summer, around the time of Nelson Mandela’s birthday. He’ll be 89 this year, and I try to share it with him every year. I can’t believe that he and I are 99.9 percent the same, cause he’s so much greater, in every way, than I could ever be. But it’s true.
So on one hand, what you do with that one-tenth of one percent of you that’s different makes all the difference, but if you think it’s more important than what you have in common, then the problems that bedevil all the world are likely to overwhelm all the wonderful things you might otherwise do.
If you think about what it would take for your grandchildren to be sitting here on this day, like this, 50 years from now, we have to deal with climate change and resource depletion. We have to reconcile the world and move it away from terror and the maniacal spread of lethal weapons. We have to develop cooperative systems to deal with disease. And we cannot continue to have this spreading inequality. We have to widen the circle of opportunity within and beyond the national borders.
And it all starts with questions of community and identity and the elemental knowledge that what we have in common is more important than what divides us.
I do a lot of work in Africa, as the president said (Ron Liebowitz, president of Middlebury College), with my AIDS project. We sell medicine the cheapest in the world in 66 countries, but we have health projects in 25. And I never cease to be amazed by how smart people are who have no money, no education, nothing, just lots of observation and received wisdom.
In South Africa, in Mandela’s tribe’s language Xhosa, people discuss the idea of community in a fundamental, almost existential way, with a word which was adopted by the youth service project he and I started for black and white kids in South Africa, as the motto: Ubutu. It simply means in English, “I am because you are.” Our differences cannot be as important as our common humanity because we couldn’t even exist, in any meaningful sense, without each other.
And a little north of there, in the central highlands when people meet each other—they’re walking on long path—and one person says “Hello, good morning, how are you,” the answer is not “I’m fine, how are you?”, the answer, in English, is “I see you.”
Think about that. Think about how empowering that is. Think about the difference between that and a world of people obsessed with concentrating power instead of empowerment, with control instead of freedom, with imposed ideology instead of reasoned evidence. “I see you.”
Now, most of you don’t have a racist bone in your body, most of you don’t have a sexist bone in your body, most of you are probably as free of artificial categorical bigotry as any group of young people has ever been. But you have gifts. The gift of a fine mind, the gift of a chance to be here, the gift of all the choices you have when you leave. So the bigotry you will have to work hard to avoid is not seeing everyone else.
We leave here today, somebody’s going to have to come in and fold up all these chairs, and clean this place up—and a lot of people who do that work think no one ever sees them. They have to be involved in the fight against climate change, too, and the fight against income inequality. They have to have chances in life.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned traveling the world, it’s that intelligence and effort are equally distributed. Organization, investment, and opportunity are not. And so, too many people remain unseen.
I believe you will live in the most interesting, peaceful, prosperous time the world has ever known. Even if we need to deal with terror for a few more decades, they’re going to have to really work to kill as many innocent people as were killed from political violence in the 20th century—in two world wars and the Holocaust, in the purges in the Soviet Union and in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and all the tribal wars in Africa—I think you’re going to have a better time of it.
But only if, with all of our scientific advances, we can drive home the elemental requirement of community that will lead all of us to serve, whether we’re in office or just in private life--because our common humanity is more important than our differences, and because we must see everyone.
That is what I wish for you. As you save the world, remember all the people in it. If you see everyone—if you believe that we are because others are—if you serve in that spirit—your grandchildren will be here 50 years from now. And it will be even better, because you will have fulfilled humanity’s first obligation: to honor what is holy about it, and to pass it on.
Thank you, and God bless you.”
(thunderous standing ovation)
Contact Ed Barna at outabout@sover.net
