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Remarks of former U.S. President Bill Clinton
Harvard College Class Day 2007, Harvard Yard
Thank you very much, Samantha, Stephanie, Chris, all the marshals, all the student speakers. Thanks for the gags and the jokes, and you know, when I got invited to do this, it was humbling in some ways. They asked Bill Gates to be the Commencement speaker. He's got more money than I do [LAUGHTER] and he went to Harvard. And I brought my friend Glenn Hutchins here with me, who's at his 30th reunion and he had something to do with overseeing the endowment and he explained that Gates was really, really, really rich and I was just rich [LAUGHTER]. And then I thought, well, the students asked me and that's good and besides, I don't have to wear a robe.

But I couldn’t figure out why on what is supposed to be a festive and informal day, you would pick a gray-haired 60-year-old to speak.

Following the great tradition of Al Franken, Will Ferrell [LAUGHTER], Borat or Ali G or whoever he was that day [LAUGHTER]. Conan O'Brien, that Family Guy person. What a tradition. So I did like Talladega Nights, however. Then I was reading all I could find out about the class and I thought well, they don't have any fun today. They already had fun. They had this class-wide Risk tournament around exam time [LAUGHTER]. And I understood when I heard the followership speech, I understood why you had that. Now you can all run for president. You played Risk. It's an eight-year Risk tournament. Then I thought well, maybe it's because you're about to name Drew Faust your next president, and I think women should run everything now [LAUGHTER]. And then I figure maybe it's just because Robin Williams and Billy Crystal turned you down [LAUGHTER]. But for whatever reason, we're here and I have had a really good time [LAUGHTER].

You've already heard most of what you need to hear today, I think. But I want to focus for a minute on the fact that these graduating classes since 1968 have invited a few non-comedians. First was Martin Luther King [APPLAUSE], who was killed in April before. I remember that very well because it was my senior year at Georgetown. He was killed in April, before he could come and give the speech. And Coretta came and gave the speech for him here. And you’ve had Mother Teresa and you've had Bono. What do they all have in common? They are symbols of our common humanity and a rebuke even to humorists' cynicism. Martin Luther King basically said he lived the way he did because we were all caught in what he called an inescapable web of mutuality. Nelson Mandela, the world's greatest living example of that, I believe, comes from a tribe in South Africa, the Xhosa, who call it ubuntu. In English, I am because you are. That led Mother Teresa from Albania to spend her life with the poorest people on earth in Calcutta. It led Bono from his rock stage to worry about innocent babies dying of AIDS, and poor people with good minds who never got a chance to follow their dreams. This is a really fascinating time to be a college senior. I was looking at all of you, wishing I could start over again and thinking I'd let you be president if you let me be 21 [LAUGHTER].

I'd take a chance on making it all over again if I could do it again. But I think, just think what an exciting time it is. All this explosion of knowledge. Just in the last couple of weeks before I came here, I read that thanks to the sequencing of the human genome, the ongoing research has identified two markers which seem to be high predictors of diabetes, which, as you heard, is a very important thing to me because it's now predicted that one in three children born in the United States in this decade will develop diabetes. We run the risk that we could be raising a first generation of kids to live shorter lives than their parents. Not because we're hungry, but because we don't eat the right things and we don't exercise. But this is a big deal. Then right after that, I saw that through our powerful telescopes we have identified a planet orbiting one of the hundred stars closest to our solar system, that appears to have the atmospheric conditions so similar to ours that life could actually be possible there. Alas, even though it's close to us in terms of the great universe, it's still 20 million light-years away. Unreachable in the lifetime of any young person. So unless there's a budding astrophysicist in the class that wants to get married in a hurry and then commit three generations and take another couple with him, we'll have to wait for them to come to us. It's an exciting time.

It's also exciting because of all the diversity. If you look around this audience, I was thinking, I wonder how different this crowd would have looked if someone like me had been giving this speech 30 years ago. And how much more interesting it is for all of us.

It’s a frustrating time, because for all the opportunity, there’s a lot of inequality. There’s a lot of insecurity and there’s a lot of instability and unsustainability. Half the world’s people still live on less than two bucks a day. A billion on less than a dollar a day. A billion people go to bed hungry tonight. A billion people won’t get a clean glass of water today or any day in their lives. One in four of all the people who die this year will die from AIDS, TB, malaria and infections related to dirty water. Nobody in America dies of any of that except people whose AIDS medicine doesn’t work anymore, or people who decline to follow the prescribed regime.

In the United States in the last decade, we have had six years of economic growth, an all-time high in the stock market, a 40-year high in corporate profits. Workers are doing better every year with productivity, but median wages are stagnant. And there’s actually been in all this so-called recovery a 4 percent increase in the percentage of people working full-time falling below the poverty line, and a 4 percent increase in the percentage of people working, who with their families, have lost their health insurance. It’s an unequal time. It’s an uncertain, insecure time because we’re all vulnerable to terror, to weapons of mass destruction, to global pandemics like avian influenza. We all make fun of the modern media and culture all the time, but I thought it was interesting in my little house in Chappaqua, where I stay home alone rooting for the candidate [LAUGHTER], I watch the evening news in the last few months, and it’s interesting. Somehow, clawing its way through the stories of the latest crime endeavor in our neighborhood and whether Britney Spears’ hair has grown out or not, I have learned that there were chickens in Romania, India and Indonesia identified with avian influenza and that every chicken within three square miles, those unfortunate ones, was eradicated. On the evening news, competing with Britney Spears and crime. Why? That’s a good thing because of the shared insecurity we feel. You all saw it this week in all of the stories about the terrorist attack being thwarted in Kennedy airport.

Now remember a few months ago, everybody I knew was shaking their head when we found out that there was a plot in London to put explosive chemicals in a baby bottle to make it look like formula to evade the airport inspection. And every time I ask somebody, I said did you feel a chill go up and down your spine, they said yeah, they did. Because they can imagine being on the airplane, or in my case, I could imagine my daughter, who has to travel a lot on her job, being on the airplane. But here’s what I want to tell you about that. The inequality is fixable and the insecurity is manageable. We’re going to really have to go some in the 21st century to see political violence claim as many innocent lives as it did in the 20th century. Keep in mind you had what, 12 million people killed in World War I, somewhere between 15 and 20 million in World War II, six million in the Holocaust, six million Jews, three million others. Twenty million in the political purges in the former Soviet Union between the two world wars and one afterward. Two million in Cambodia alone. Millions in tribal wars in Africa. An untold but large number in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I mean, we’re going to have to really get after it, if you expect your generation to claim as many innocents from political violence as was claimed in the 20th century. The difference is you think it could be you this time. Because of the interdependence of the world. So yes, it’s insecure but it’s manageable.

It’s also an unsustainable world because of climate change, resource depletion, and the fact that between now and 2050, the world’s supposed to grow from six and a half to nine billion people, with most of the growth in the countries least able to handle it, under today’s conditions, never mind those. That’s all fixable, too. So is climate change a problem? Is resource depletion a problem? Is poverty and the fact that 130 million kids never go to school and all this disease that I work on a problem? You bet it is. But I believe the most important problem is the way people think about it and each other, and themselves. The world is awash today in political, religious, almost psychological conflicts, which require us to divide up and demonize people who aren’t us. And every one of them in one way or the other is premised on a very simple idea. That our differences are more important than our common humanity. I would argue that Mother Teresa was asked here, Bono was asked here, and Martin Luther King was asked here because this class believed that they were people who thought our common humanity was more important than our differences [APPLAUSE].

So with this Harvard degree and your incredible minds and your spirits that I’ve gotten a little sense of today, this gives you virtually limitless possibilities. But you have to decide how to think about all this and what to do with your own life in terms of what you really think. I hope that you will share Martin Luther King’s dream, embrace Mandela’s spirit of reconciliation, support Bono’s concern for the poor and follow Mother Teresa’s life into some active service. Ordinary people have more power to do public good than ever before because of the rise of non-governmental organizations, because of the global media culture, because of the Internet, which gives people of modest means the power, if they all agree, to change the world. When former President Bush and I were asked to work on the tsunami, before we did the Katrina work, Americans, many of whom could not find the Maldives or Sri Lanka on a map, gave $1.2 billion to tsunami aid. Thirty percent of our households gave. Half of them gave over the Internet, which means you don’t even have to be rich to change the world if enough people agree with you. But we have to do this. Citizen service is a tradition in our country about as old as Harvard, and certainly older than the government.

Benjamin Franklin organized the first volunteer fire department in Philadelphia 40 years before the Constitution was ratified. When de Tocqueville came here in 1835, he talked among other things about how he was amazed that Americans just were always willing to step up and do something, not wait for someone else to do it. Now we have in America a 1,010,000 non-governmental groups. Not counting 355,000 religious groups, most of whom are involved in some sort of work to help other people. India has a million registered, over a half a million active. China has 280,000 registered and twice that many not registered because they don’t want to be confined. Russia has 400,000, so many that President Putin is trying to restrict them. I wish he wouldn’t do that, but it’s a high-class problem. There were no NGOs in Russia or China when I became president in 1993. All over the world we have people who know that they can do things to change, but again, I will say to all of you, there is no challenge we face, no barrier to having your grandchildren here on this beautiful site 50 years from now, more profound than the ideological and emotional divide which continues to demean our common life and undermine our ability to solve our common problems. The simple idea that our differences are more important than our common humanity.

When the human genome was sequenced, and the most interesting thing to me as a non-scientist – we finished it in my last year I was president, I really rode herd on this thing and kept throwing more money at it – the most interesting thing to me was the discovery that human beings with their three billion genomes are 99.9 percent identical genetically. So if you look around this vast crowd today, at the military caps and the baseball caps and the cowboy hats and the turbans, if you look at all the different colors of skin, all the heights, all the widths, all the everything, it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our genetic make-up. Don’t you think it’s interesting that not just people you find appalling, but all the rest of us, spend 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of one percent? I mean, don’t we all? How much of the laugh lines in the speeches were about that? At least I didn’t go to Yale, right? [LAUGHTER] That Brown gag was hilarious. [LAUGHTER]

But it’s all the same deal, isn’t it? I mean, the intellectual premise is that the only thing that really matters about our lives are the distinctions we can draw. Indeed, one of the crassest elements of modern culture, all these sort of talk shows, and even a lot of political journalism that's sort of focused on this shallow judgmentalism. They try to define everybody down by the worst moment in their lives, and it all is about well, no matter whatever’s wrong with me, I’m not that. And yet, you ask Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Bono to come here. Nelson Mandela’s the most admired person in the world. I got tickled the other night. I wound up in a restaurant in New York with a bunch of friends of mine. And I looked over and two tables away, and there was Rush Limbaugh [LAUGHTER], who’s said a few mad things about me. So I went up and shook hands with him and said hello and met his dinner guest. And I came just that close to telling him we were 99.9 percent the same. [LAUGHTER] But I didn’t want to ruin the poor man’s dessert, so I let it go. [LAUGHTER]

Now we’re laughing about this but next month, I’m making my annual trek to Africa to see the work of my AIDS and development project, and to celebrate with Nelson Mandela his birthday. He’s 89. Don’t know how many more he’ll have. And when I think that I might be 99.9 percent the same as him, I can’t even fathom it. So I say that to you, do we have all these other problems? Is Darfur a tragedy? Do I wish America would adopt sensible climate change regulation? Do I hate the fact that ideologues in the government doctored scientific reports? Do I disagree with a thousand things that are going on? Absolutely. But it all flows from the idea that we can violate elemental standards of learning and knowledge and reason and even the humanity of our fellow human beings because our differences matter more. That’s what makes you worship power over purpose. Our differences matter more. One of the greatest things that’s happened in the last few years is doing all this work with former President Bush. You know, I ought to be doing this. I’m healthy and not totally antiquated. He’s 82 years old, still jumping out of airplanes and still doing stuff like this. And I love the guy. I’m sorry for all the diehard Democrats in the audience. I just do. [LAUGHTER] And life is all about seeing things new every day. And I’ll just close with two stories, one from Asia, one from Africa. And I’m telling you all the details don’t matter as much as this.

After George Bush and I did the tsunami, we got so into this disaster work that Kofi Annan asked him to oversee the UN’s efforts in Pakistan after the earthquake, which you acknowledged today, and asked me to stay on as the tsunami coordinator for two years. So on my next to last trip to Aceh in Indonesia, the by far the hardest hit place, a quarter of a million people killed. I went to one of these refugee camps where in the sweltering heat, several thousand people were still living in tents. Highly uncomfortable. And my job was to go there and basically listen to them complain and figure out what to do about it, and how to get them out of there more quickly. So every one of these camps elected a camp leader and when I appeared, I was introduced to my young interpreter, a young Indonesian woman, and to the guy who was the camp leader, and his wife and his son. And they smiled, said hello, and then I looked down at this little boy, and I literally could not breathe. I think he’s the most beautiful child I ever saw. And I said to my young interpreter, I said, I believe that’s the most beautiful boy I ever saw in my life. She said, yes, he’s very beautiful and before the tsunami he had nine brothers and sisters. And now they’re all gone.

So the wife and the son excused themselves. And the father who had lost his nine children proceeded to take me on a two-hour tour of this camp. He had a smile on his face. He never talked about anything but what the people in that camp needed. He gave no hint of what had happened to him and the grief that he bore. We get to the end of the tour. It’s the health clinic in the camp. I look up and there is his wife, a mother who had lost nine of her 10 children, holding a little bitty baby less than a week old, the newest born baby in the camp. And she told me, I’m going to get in trouble for telling this. She told me that in Indonesian culture, when a woman has a baby, she gets to go to bed for 40 days and everyone waits on her hand and foot. [LAUGHTER] She doesn’t get up, nothing happens. And then on the 40th day, the mother gets up out of bed, goes back to work doing her life and they name the baby. So this child was less than a week old. So this mother who had lost her nine children is here holding this baby. And she says to me, this is our newest born baby. And we want you to name him. Little boy. So I looked at her and I said through my interpreter, I said, do you have a name for new beginning? And she explained and the woman said something back and the interpreter said yes, luckily for you, in Indonesian the word for dawn is a boy’s name. And the mother just said to me, we will call this child Dawn and he will symbolize our new beginning. You shouldn’t have to meet people that lose nine of their 10 children, cherish the one they got left, and name a newborn baby Dawn to realize that what we have in common is more important than what divides us. [APPLAUSE]

And I leave you with this thought. When Martin Luther King was invited here in 1968, the country was still awash in racism. The next decade it was awash in sexism, and after that in homophobia. And occasionally those things rear their ugly head along the way, but by and large, nobody in this class is going to carry those chains around through life. But nobody gets out for free, and everyone has temptations. The great temptation for all of you is to believe that the one-tenth of one percent of you which is different and which brought you here and which can bring you great riches or whatever else you want, is really the sum of who you are and that you deserve your good fate, and others deserve their bad one. That is the trap into which you must not fall. Warren Buffett's just about to give away 99 percent of his money because he said most of it he made because of where he was born and when he was born. It was a lucky accident. And his work was rewarded in this time and place more richly than the work of teachers and police officers and nurses and doctors and people who cared for those who deserve to be cared for. So he’s just going to give it away. And still with less than one percent left, have more than he could ever spend. Because he realizes that it wasn’t all due to the one-tenth of one percent, and that his common humanity requires him to give money to those for whom it will mean much more.

In the central highlands in Africa where I work, when people meet each other walking, nearly nobody rides, and people meet each other walking on the trails, and one person says hello, how are you, good morning, the answer is not I’m fine, how are you. The answer translated into English is this: I see you. Think of that. I see you. How many people do all of us pass every day that we never see? You know, we all haul out of here, somebody’s going to come in here and fold up 20-something thousand chairs. And clean off whatever mess we leave here. And get ready for tomorrow and then after tomorrow, someone will have to fix that. Many of those people feel that no one ever sees them. I would never have seen the people in Aceh in Indonesia if a terrible misfortune had not struck. And so, I leave you with that thought. Be true to the tradition of the great people who have come here. Spend as much of your time and your heart and your spirit as you possibly can thinking about the 99.9 percent. See everyone and realize that everyone needs new beginnings. Enjoy your good fortune. Enjoy your differences, but realize that our common humanity matters much, much more. God bless you and good luck.