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TOM BROKAW
COMMENCEMENT SPEECH TO THE 2006 GRADUATION CLASS
This is a transcript of the Florida State
University commencement address delivered Saturday, April 29th at the Civic
Center by former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. 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 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. 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. 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.
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