Commencement Address - University of North Carolina at Pembroke

Here, in this place, 116 years ago, the Native American people of Robeson County, petitioned their government for a school to train teachers for Native Americans. More than 40,000 days later, and as many students later, the acts of those founding fathers are making a difference in the life of this great state, in this life of this vibrant county, and in the lives of you, the 2003 graduating class of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

These are facts you know well. You have heard them since you entered here. But have you really heard them, heard what they have told you about what you can accomplish? Here's what they have been saying to you: You can accomplish anything to which you are willing to devote your time, your energy, your mind, and your passion. And here's what it takes: it takes an action, the simple act of doing something.

You never know as you move through life which things you do will simply be isolated deeds, good or bad. And you never know which things you do, good or bad, will start an avalanche.

Now the petitioners who started the Croatan Normal School knew that their work would be for good, but they never imagined this campus more than one hundred years later. They started an avalanche that will not stop today or ten years or fifty years from now. Their good deed will live on.

I have an idea of one way in which you can act, in the days and years to come that can help build another avalanche for good. You will not be building an institution, you will be breaking one down: the institution of racial intolerance.

This university, which was built as a school for Native Americans, is perhaps the best national model of racial diversity in the country. Where better to start this avalanche?

Elie Weisel, the novelist, lecturer, and Holocaust survivor, said something a few years ago that has stuck with me. He was answering a question about how to stop the violence that surrounds us -- particularly the violence that grows out of ethnic and religious hatred. He said that hatred's first toeholds are not in violent acts. Hatred's first toehold's are in words.

We have all heard them - the words of intolerance, the words of hatred, the words that can lead to violence. But the first step in creating an atmosphere in which hatred, violence, and intolerance can thrive is actually tolerance: we have become complacent, and we have too long tolerated the language of hatred.

We hear someone called a demeaning name, and - precisely because we are civil - we do not confront the speaker. We hear it repeated, and again we are civil. And silent. In time, these words of hatred seem to have lost their meaning, or we have lost our sensitivity to them.

Then the words change, they are more vitriolic, more angry, and each new mutation carries more hatred, more intolerance. And we cannot speak. Or we do not speak.

The next time there is a gesture, and then a threat. We decide to lead by example instead of confronting the hatred, and we are quiet. We console ourselves that it is not that we do not see the moral dilemma in front of us - it is that we chose a path that avoids confrontation with it.
But make no mistake: our passivity is hatred's ally. In human relations, silence implies consent.

And when, finally, there is violence, when the world we have allowed to fester and grow finally blooms in the only way it could, in violence - we fail to look in the mirror to find one of the causes.

A few years ago, the state of North Carolina had the distinction of being home to the winner of the National Book Award for fiction. We are all proud of Charles Frazier, who wrote Cold Mountain. In many ways Mr. Frazier's book is all of our stories.

The main character, Inman, a soldier of the Confederacy, walks away from a Raleigh military hospital, and turns his face away from a war he does not understand and toward the North Carolina mountains, his home. His journey is terrifying and rich, and he - and we - learn many lessons from it.
One lesson we learn is that ultimately we cannot walk away from the terror around us. Inman walked away from one battlefield, but the war followed him.

We turn our backs daily from small battlegrounds. A nasty remark about a difficult accent. A joke at the expense of one wearing unfamiliar dress. An epithet directed to one with a different color of skin. We excuse our silence because these are not our battles. We have other reasons too, of course. We are civil. Confrontation is unproductive. We have too little time. It is not our job.

Well, that is wrong. It is your job. You, the graduates of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke are the best-prepared graduates in the country to confront the bigotry and hatred we have yet to purge from this great nation.

It is your job to create the best world you can, even if there may be a cost to you. You have been blessed. You have been the beneficiary of one of the finest educations available on this planet. You have been introduced to a world wonderful and rich in its diversity. You have sat at this banquet table for four years, and you owe something back for the opportunity.

You -- and we -- have an obligation to make this community, our state, our great nation, and even this world more embracing. You -- and we -- have an obligation to stand against the forces of intolerance that deny opportunity to others. You -- and we -- have an obligation to confront hatred and state clearly that it will no longer be tolerated.

In my campaign for the United States Senate, I often quoted Robert F. Kennedy, although you scholars may know that the images were from The Inferno by Dante: "The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who - in times of moral crisis - do nothing."

Well, it is May 10th, 2003, and although you and your families are enjoying one of the great days of your life, today is also one of a long list of days in which each of us faces a moral crisis.

Will we act or will we stand quiet?

There was a book written about the years around 1974 when I graduated from N.C. State. It was written by John Dean, about his experiences in Watergate, and it is entitled it Blind Ambition.

I want to change that a little and give you a title for the years following 2003: I want these to be years of "blind compassion." Blind to the things that separate us, those niches in which hatred can grow; blind to our own self-interests, which excuse our inaction on behalf of others.

And compassionate in every sense of the word. Loving and tender with our families and warm and supportive of those in our communities.

You might be thinking that these are easy words to say and that they have no relationship to the life now unfolding before you. But they do.
Your position in the world is about to change. It is easy just to sit at the table, do your assigned part, don?t make anyone uncomfortable, do not break any rules - or any ground.

If this is what you chose to do with your degree and your life, no one will speak ill of you. . . . But maybe no one will speak of you at all.

Life is short. A thoughtful man I know compared it to the streak of a comet across the sky.

How brightly you burn on this journey will not depend on what you do for yourselves. It will depend, I am certain, on what you do for others, on how you treat others, on how you permit others to be treated in your presence. The fireball at the head of that comet will burn itself out. You can count on it. What remains - in fact and in the minds of those who saw - is the tail of the comet: what you leave behind you.

There are a lot of ways to describe this: we think of heroes, of martyrs, of saints. But in truth, making a difference does not have to have such a grand name.

In fact, I think giving it such a grand name makes us think we cannot attain this status. I am here to tell you that you can.

I know you can, because one hundred and sixteen years ago, your forefathers, the founding fathers of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, acted and made a difference. In the recent months, our brothers, our friends, our kin, have been braver than even they thought possible on the ground and in the air above Iraq.

Whether in military or civilian life, there are battlegrounds that are not so hard to find, if you are looking.

Where there is hatred, there is your battleground. Where there is injustice, there is your battleground. Where there is misery, there is your battleground.

Over 35 years ago on April 4, 1968, Doctor Martin Luther King was killed. On that dark night in American history, Bobby Kennedy spoke to his fellow Americans. He urged us "to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

You, as graduates of this great University, as beneficiaries of a bounty few will know, stand at the edge of a new world.

Whether that world is better for your presence - whether you make gentle the life of this world - is entirely up to you.

Congratulations to all of you, and may God bless you.