A Call to Personal Commitment This is a transcript of the Florida State University commencement address delivered Saturday, April 29, 2006 by former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. This for you is a moment to be cherished, the last rites of your protected passage through the age of innocence to the daunting and exciting possibilities of a world that is now for you to shape. It is for me no less a time to savor, a ritual of renewal and hope and examination. The conceit that I may instruct, inspire or even entertain you is not lost on me, but since we've gone to all this trouble, perhaps we should proceed. I am tempted to simply borrow the favorite line of my friend Art Buchwald on these occasions: "We have given you a perfect world. Don't screw it up." Instead I would like to offer a few observations on the realities and the opportunities of your generation. You are the generation of a transformational technology that for all it's breathtaking possibilities really is just now in a seminal stage. You live in a world of personal computers and search engines, e-mail and networks, capacity and storage, research and retrieval, entertainment and commerce, chat rooms and Web sites. You're manned with cell phones that take pictures, remember your tastes, indulge your whimsies and play your favorite tunes. You have video on demand and songs on a chip, games on a screen Bloggers that blabber and blogs that enlighten. You're exposed to hi-def and low-brow. You're the masters of a new universe. Or are you? Imagine the power felt by students 100 years ago, those mostly young men who were poised at the cutting edge of their own new century with the new tools available to them: electricity, flight, automobiles, telephones, transcontinental travel by rail. Great fortunes being amassed in steel, oil, banking. My god, the possibilities. And yet it became a century of great perils. Two world wars, the second one giving birth to the nuclear age—and in the center of Western civilization the darkest of darkness: a holocaust designed to exterminate a great people and their faith. Other wars that left deep scars at home as well as on the battlefield. A political and economic ideology introduced as an instrument of liberation that became one of history's cruelest forms of oppression. At one end of the scale great powers developed weapons capable of ending life on earth as we know it. At the other end, religious fanatics turned their bodies into weapons and their zealotry into suicide assaults. The code of life was cracked, but plagues took new forms. But wait. It was also the century in which the universe of political freedom expanded as it never had before. When science crashed through frontiers heretofore thought to be impenetrable. When gender and race discrimination finally made it on to the global agenda in meaningful fashion. Welcome to the world of perpetual contradictions. Welcome to the world of unintended consequences and unexpected realities. Welcome to a world in which war is not a video game, K for combat. In which genocide and ancient hatreds are not eliminated with a delete button. You won't find the answer to global poverty in "tools" or "help." You can't fix the environment by hitting the insert heading on the tool bar. You cannot take your place in the long line of those who came before you simply by sitting at a keyboard or in front of a screen. The late Edward R. Murrow addressed similar concerns for another generation when he said of television: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to that end. Otherwise it is mere lights and wires in a box.” We live in a world vastly different from the one Mr. Murrow described, vastly different from the world of just 20 years ago. We live on a smaller planet with more people, many of them on the move in a desperate search for economic opportunity and political freedom, a world of ever diminishing open spaces, disappearing natural resources, with great, seismic shifts in political, economic and cultural power, a world in which everything happens at warp speed. We live at the apogee of Western civilization and in despair that ancient sectarian rivalries are lethal alternatives to reason and modernity. We live in a world of a rapidly expanding population of Muslims who love our culture and hate our government, who envy our successes, disdain our pluralism and are enraged by our sense of entitlement. Young Muslims who live in politically and economically oppressive regimes where they are easy prey for religious teachers who preach jihad against the West as a matter of faith. We cannot ignore them and, as the last four years has demonstrated in tragic fashion, a military response is at best only a part of the equation. If that rage and hostility is not addressed in a more effective manner in the West and in the Islamic world as well, we will live in a perpetual state of terror. So a primary challenge of our time is to bank the fires of hostility now burning out of control, to neutralize the hatred, to expedite not just global competition economically and politically but also global understanding. To do so requires more than imagination or a fresh political strategy. It requires personal commitment. When I am asked who are the memorable personalities I've encountered in more than 40 years in journalism, I suspect my interrogators expect me to say, “Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Dr. Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Nobel laureates, Pavarotti, Michael Jordan, Cesar Chavez or any number of big name, marquee names that made up the headlines of my career. Instead, I recall the brave young people who risked their lives demonstrating for civil rights in the American South; the young who fought against the war in Vietnam—and those who stepped forward when their country called and fought in the war; the young surgeon who worked through the night, under fire, in a dimly lit tent to save still another victim of the anarchy in Somalia; the brave young Chinese who stood up to their oppressors during Tiananmen Square; the Tibetan lamas who risked their lives for their faith and their land; the gifted biologists who dedicate their lives to saving this precious planet. The vast population of people, young and old, of every hue and origin, who gave up comfort and convention to answer their conscience and were guided by their moral compass to difficult challenges, determined to make a difference. They lived in the real world and took responsibility for it. They did not attach themselves to a virtual experience and find satisfaction in a search engine. They were the boots on the ground, hands in the dirt, nights in scary places, healing, courageous generation. They stepped into the unknown and made it more welcoming. It is part of the privilege of my good fortune that I can stay at four-star hotels with bathrooms larger than the living rooms of my childhood; I can dine at world-class restaurants, attend state dinners, chat up kings, queens, billionaires, movers and shakers on every continent. But I am never more alive or intellectually and emotionally involved than when I am sitting outside a gher in Mongolia, listening to a young nomadic tribesman describe how he rode his horse 20 miles to vote—or sleeping in a cargo container in the Pakistan earthquake zone with young American relief workers or riding a Humvee with American special forces through a combat zone in Afghanistan to a primitive village to determine their medical needs or stepping into a wilderness anywhere in the world with all I need in a backpack, no call waiting, thank you very much. Life away from the keyboard, the PDA and the cell phone is a life in which you connect to the Web site of your convictions, especially as a citizen, an obligation you must carry with you all the rest of your days. You leave here with a degree and an unspoken expectation that you will use what you have learned not just for your satisfaction but for those around you as well. And that role is never more satisfying than when it is exercised robustly as a citizen, especially when others are attempting to suppress your participation or belittle your beliefs. These are difficult times. We are at war. And as all wars are, this one is freighted with mistakes, miscalculations, lethal consequences and highly charged emotions. It is a debate in which we all have a stake. I have a special place in my mind and in my heart for those who understand that patriotism is not a loyalty oath. I am never more proud to be an American than when a fellow citizen steps from the pack and says, “Can't we do better?” If we portray ourselves as patrons of democracy abroad, we must be certain we're stewards at home of the fundamental tenets of that governing principle—the rule of law and free speech. On this campus, you safeguard the memories of another generation of Americans, what I called the Greatest Generation, the young men and women who came of age in the Great Depression, when this country was on the brink of a calamitous economic and political collapse. They grew up with the ethos of sacrifice and common purpose. There was no epidemic of obesity in the Depression, because there was so little to eat. In too many places, jobs, if you could find them, paid maybe a dollar a day, or less. And just when that dark time in this country was beginning to ebb, America was attacked at Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war. The president asked these young Americans for still more sacrifices. He asked them to go thousands of miles across the Atlantic and thousands of miles across the Pacific and fight in the greatest war history has known. At home, those left behind turned the country into a military assembly line, turning out new planes, tanks, weapons at an unprecedented pace. Meat and sugar were rationed, along with gasoline, so the troops could have what they needed. Every day, every American family worried about their loved ones in harm's way or their neighbor's. When the war was over, when America and its allies triumphed in the greatest victory ever over Nazi fascism and Japanese imperialism, these young men and women your age—who had only known hardship and sacrifice—set out to build the America we have today. They expanded the rights of minorities and women left behind too long. They gave us new industries, new science, new art; they went to college in record numbers and married in record numbers. They produced a distinctive and gifted generation called the Boomers—your parents—and gave them unparalleled opportunities. And you are the beneficiaries. You've not had to survive a Great Depression. When war came to your generation, you could decide whether to go or stay home. Most of you will leave this campus with more earthly possessions than your grandparents had after 20 years of hard work. But you have this in common: the privilege of American citizenship and the legacy of exercising it every day for the common welfare of those here at home and those beyond our shores who still look to the idea of America as a powerful statement of what should be possible for all. Show the world how to hate hate. Love your mother, Mother Earth. Become colorblind. And define greatness for your generation. |