Bill Moy­ers to col­lege grads: “We’re really sorry for the mess you’re inher­it­ing.”

May 25, 2006
I will make this brief because I know you have much to do between now and your farewell to Hamil­ton tomor­row, and that you are eager to get out and enjoy this per­fect day in this glo­ri­ous weather that some­how never gets men­tioned in your pro­mo­tional and recruit­ment literature.

I know so many Hamil­ton alums that I feel at home here. One of my clos­est friends and col­leagues, David Bate, grad­u­ated in 1938, and patriot that he is, headed right for the U.S. Navy where he served through­out World War II. David’s father grad­u­ated from Hamil­ton in 1908 and two of his chil­dren con­tin­ued the tra­di­tion. I asked David what he learned at Hamil­ton and he told me Hamil­ton is where you dis­cover that being smart has noth­ing to do with being warm and dry ... Just kidding!

Thank you for invit­ing Judith and me to share this occa­sion with you. Fifty years ago both of us turned the same cor­ner you are turn­ing today and left col­lege for the great beyond. Look­ing back across half a cen­tury I wish our speaker at the time had said some­thing really use­ful — some­thing that would have bet­ter pre­pared us for what lay ahead. I wish he had said: “Don’t Go.”

So I have been think­ing seri­ously about what I might say to you in this Bac­calau­re­ate ser­vice. Frankly, I’m not sure any­one from my gen­er­a­tion should be say­ing any­thing to your gen­er­a­tion except, “We’re sorry. We’re really sorry for the mess you’re inher­it­ing. We are sorry for the war in Iraq. For the huge debts you will have to pay for with­out get­ting a new social infra­struc­ture in return. We’re sorry for the polar­ized coun­try. The cor­po­rate scan­dals. The cor­rupt pol­i­tics. Our imper­iled democ­racy. We’re sorry for the sprawl and our addic­tion to oil and for all those tox­ins in the envi­ron­ment. Sorry about all this, class of 2006. Good luck clean­ing it up.”

You’re going to have your hands full, frankly. I don’t need to tell you of the gloomy sce­nar­ios being writ­ten for your time. Three books on my desk right now ques­tion whether human beings will even sur­vive the 21st cen­tury. Just lis­ten to their titles: “The Long Emer­gency: Sur­viv­ing the Con­ver­gence Cat­a­stro­phe”; “Col­lapse: How Soci­eties Choose to Fail or Suc­ceed”; “The Winds of Change: Weather and the Destruc­tion of Civilizations.”

These are just three of the recent books that make the apoc­a­lypse proph­e­sied in the Bible ... the Rev­e­la­tions of St. John ... look like child’s play. I won’t sum­ma­rize them for you except to say that they spell out Dooms­day sce­nar­ios for global cat­a­stro­phe. There’s another recent book called “The Revenge of Gaia” that could well have been sub­ti­tled, “The Earth Strikes Back,” because the author, James Love­lock, says human con­sump­tion, our obses­sion with tech­nol­ogy, and our habit of “play­ing God” are strip­ping bare nature’s assets until the Earth’s only con­so­la­tion will be to take us down with her. Before this cen­tury is over, he writes, “Bil­lions of us will die and the few breed­ing pairs of peo­ple that sur­vive will be kept in the Arc­tic where the cli­mate remains tol­er­a­ble.” So there you have it: The future of the race, to be joined in a final and fatal march of the penguins.

Of course that’s not the only sce­nario. You can Google your way to a lot of opti­mistic pos­si­bil­i­ties. For one, the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion that will trans­form how we do busi­ness and live our lives, includ­ing active intel­li­gent wire­less devices that in just a short time could link every aspect of our phys­i­cal world and even human brains, cre­at­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of small-scale busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties. There are med­ical break­throughs that will con­quer many ills and extend longevity. Eco­nomic changes will lift hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple out of absolute poverty in the next 25 years, dwarf­ing any­thing that’s come along in the pre­vi­ous 100 years. These are pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios, too. But I’m a jour­nal­ist, not a prophet. I can’t say which of these sce­nar­ios will prove true. You won’t be bored, that’s for sure. I just wish I were going to be around to see what you do with the peril and the promise.

Since I won’t be around, I want to take this oppor­tu­nity to say a thing or two that have noth­ing to do with my pro­fes­sional work as a jour­nal­ist. What I have to say today is very per­sonal. Here it is:

If the world con­fuses you a lit­tle, it con­fuses me a lot. When I grad­u­ated fifty years ago I thought I had the answers. But life is where you get your answers ques­tioned, and the odds are that you can look for­ward to being even more per­plexed fifty years from now than you are at this very moment. If your par­ents level with you, truly speak their hearts, I sus­pect they would tell you life con­fuses them, too, and that it rarely turns out the way you thought it would.

I find I am alter­na­tively afraid, can­tan­ker­ous, bewil­dered, often hos­tile, some­times gra­cious, and bat­tered by a hun­dred new sen­sa­tions every day. I can be filled with a pes­simism as gloomy as the depth of the mid­dle ages, yet deep within me I’m pos­sessed of a hope that sim­ply won’t quit. A friend on Wall Street said one day that he was opti­mistic about the mar­ket, and I asked him, “Then why do you look so wor­ried?” He replied, “Because I’m not sure my opti­mism is jus­ti­fied.” Nei­ther am I. So I vac­il­late between the deter­mi­na­tion to act, to change things, and the desire to retreat into the snug­geries of self, fam­ily and friends.

I won­der if any of us in this great, dis­pu­ta­tious, over-analyzed, over-televised and under-tenderized coun­try know what the deuce we’re talk­ing about, myself included. All my illu­sions are up for grabs, and I find myself re-assessing many of the assump­tions that served me com­fort­able much of my life.

Ear­lier this week I heard on the radio a dis­cus­sion in New York City about the new Dis­ney Broad­way pro­duc­tion of “Tarzan,” the jun­gle hero so pop­u­lar when I was grow­ing up. I remem­ber as a kid almost dis­lo­cat­ing my ton­sils try­ing to re-create his unearthly sound, swing­ing on a great vine in a grace­ful arc toward the res­cue of his dis­tressed mate, Jane, hol­ler­ing bloody mur­der all the time. So what have we learned since? That Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weis­muller, who played Tarzan in the movies, never made that noise. It was a record­ing of three men, one a bari­tone, one a tenor, and one a hog caller from Arkansas — all yelling to the top of their lungs.

This world is hard on believers.

As a young man I was drawn to pol­i­tics. I took part in two national cam­paigns, served in the Kennedy and John­son admin­is­tra­tions, and have cov­ered pol­i­tics ever since. But I under­stand now what Thomas Jef­fer­son meant back in 1789 when he wrote: “I am not a Fed­er­al­ist because I never sub­mit­ted the whole sys­tem of my opin­ions to the creed of any party of men, whether in reli­gion, in phi­los­o­phy, in pol­i­tics, or any­thing else. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” Of course we know there’ll be no par­ties in Heaven. No Democ­rats, no Repub­li­cans, no lib­er­als, no con­ser­v­a­tives, no lib­er­tar­i­ans or social­ists. Just us Baptists.

The hard­est strug­gle of all is to rec­on­cile life’s polar real­i­ties. I love books, Beethoven, and choco­late brown­ies. Yet how do I jus­tify my plea­sure in these in a world where mil­lions are illit­er­ate, the music never plays, and chil­dren go hun­gry through the night? How do I live sanely in a world so unsafe for so many?

I don’t know what they taught you here at Hamil­ton about all this, but I trust you are not leav­ing here with­out think­ing about how you will respond to the dis­so­nance in our cul­ture, the rivalry between beauty and bes­tial­ity in the world, and the con­flicts in your own soul. All of us have to choose sides on this jour­ney. But the ques­tion is not so much who we are going to fight agains
t as it is which side of our own nature will we nur­ture: The side that can grow weary and even cyn­i­cal and believe that every­thing is futile, or the side that for all the vul­gar­ity, bru­tal­ity and cru­elty, yearns to affirm, con­nect and signify.

Albert Camus got it right: There is beauty in the world as well as humil­i­a­tion, “And we have to strive, hard as it is, not to be unfaith­ful ... in the pres­ence of one or the other.”

That’s really what brings me here this after­noon. I did put myself in your place, and asked what I’d want a stranger from another gen­er­a­tion to tell me if I had to sit through his speech. Well, I’d want to hear the truth: The truth is, life’s a tough act, the world’s a hard place, and along the way you will meet a fair share of fools, knaves and clowns — even act the fool your­self from time to time when your guard is down or you’ve had too much wine. I’d like to be told that I will expe­ri­ence sep­a­ra­tion, loss and betrayal, that I’ll won­der at times where have all the flow­ers gone.

I would want to be told that while life includes a lot of luck, life is more than luck. It is sac­ri­fice, study, and work; appoint­ments kept, dead­lines met, promises hon­ored. I’d like to be told that it’s okay to love your coun­try right or wrong, but it’s not right to be silent when your coun­try is wrong. And I would like to be encour­aged not to give up on the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence. To remem­ber that the same cul­ture which pro­duced the Ku Klux Klan, Tom DeLay and Abu Ghraib, also brought forth the Peace Corps, Mar­tin Luther King and Hamil­ton College.

And I would like to be told that there is more to this life than I can see, earn, or learn in my time. That beyond the day-to-day spec­ta­cle are cos­mic mys­ter­ies we don’t under­stand. That in the mean­time — and the mean­time is where we live — we infin­i­tes­i­mal par­ti­cles of cre­ation carry on the mir­a­cle of lov­ing, laugh­ing and being here now, by giv­ing, shar­ing and grow­ing now.

Let me tell you one of my favorite sto­ries. It’s by Shalom Ale­ichem and it has stayed with me for many years now. The story is about Bontshe Shvayg, one of the accursed of the Earth. Every mis­for­tune imag­in­able befell him. He lost his wife, his chil­dren neglected him, his house burned down, his job disappeared—everything he touched turned to dust. Yet through all this Bontshe kept return­ing good for evil every­where he could until he died. When the angels heard he was arriv­ing at Heaven’s gate, they hur­ried down to greet him. Even the Lord was there, so great was this man’s fame for good­ness. It was the cus­tom in Heaven that every new­comer was inter­ro­gated by the pros­e­cut­ing angel, to assure that all tres­passes on Earth had been atoned. But when Bontshe reached those gates, the pros­e­cut­ing angel arose, and for the first time in the mem­ory of Heaven, said, “There are no charges.” Then the angel for the defense arose and rehearsed all the hard­ships this man had endured and recounted how in all the dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances of his life he had remained true to him­self and returned good for evil.

When the angel was fin­ished, the Lord said, “Not since Job him­self have we heard of a life such as this one.” And then, turn­ing to Bontshe, he said, “Ask, and it shall be given to you.”

The old man raised his eyes and said, “Well, if I could start every day with a hot but­tered roll...” And at that the Lord and all the angels wept, at the pre­cious­ness of what he was ask­ing for, at the beauty of sim­ple things: a but­tered roll, a clean bed, a beau­ti­ful sum­mer day, some­one to love and be loved by. These sup­ply joy and mean­ing on this earthly journey.

So I brought this with me. It’s an ordi­nary break­fast roll, per­haps one like Bontshe asked for. I brought it because it dri­ves home the last thing I want to say to you.

Bread is the great re-enforcer of the real­ity prin­ci­ple. Bread is life. But if you’re like me you have a thou­sand and more times repeated the ordi­nary expe­ri­ence of eat­ing bread with­out a thought for the process that brings it to your table. The real­ity is phys­i­cal: I need this bread to live. But the real­ity is also social: I need oth­ers to pro­vide the bread. I depend for bread on hun­dreds of peo­ple I don’t know and will never meet. If they fail me, I go hun­gry. If I offer them noth­ing of value in exchange for their loaf, I betray them. The peo­ple who grow the wheat, process and store the grain, and trans­port it from farm to city; who bake it, pack­age it, and mar­ket it — these peo­ple and I are bound together in an intri­cate rec­i­p­ro­cal bar­gain. We exchange value.

This reci­procity sus­tains us. If you doubt it, look around you. Hamil­ton Col­lege was raised here by peo­ple before your time, peo­ple you’ll never know, who were nonethe­less think­ing of you before you were born. You have received what they built and bequeathed, and in your time you will give some­thing back. That’s the deal. On and on it goes, from gen­er­a­tion to generation.

Civ­i­liza­tion sus­tains and sup­ports us. The core of its value is bread. But bread is its great metaphor. All my life I’ve prayed the Lord’s Prayer, and I’ve never prayed, “Give me this day my daily bread.” It is always, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Bread and life are shared real­i­ties. They do not hap­pen in iso­la­tion. Civ­i­liza­tion is an unnat­ural act. We have to make it hap­pen, you and I, together with all the other strangers. And because we and strangers have to agree on the dif­fer­ence between a horse thief and a horse trader, the dis­tinc­tion is eth­i­cal. With­out it, a soci­ety becomes a war against all, and a mar­ket for the wolves becomes a slaugh­ter for the lambs. My gen­er­a­tion hasn’t done the best job at hon­or­ing this eth­i­cal bar­gain, and our fail­ure explains the mess we’re hand­ing over to you. You may be our last chance to get it right. So good luck, God­speed, enjoy these last few hours together, and don’t for­get to pass the bread.