Brokaw addresses graduates' futures

The following is a transcript of tom brokaw's commencement address. Here, the working class sits side by side with the old and new fortunes; here the new Americans from distant lands and cultures mingle with the sons and daughters of Americans who came on sailing ships, some to proclaim their freedom, others in the holds and chains of slave ships. But today, here and across America in the season of commencement, they stand on common ground with shared ambitions and pride in their achievement. This is more than a ritual. It is a conspicuous statement about who we are and it is a declaration of renewal. Oh, that we could freeze this moment and all of its meaning and carry it with us the rest of our lives. Since we cannot, let us go forward, students and families, faculty and administrators, friends and creditors. We have lives to live, careers to pursue and parties to attend. I am honored to be with you. I know what is expected of me. Brevity, most of all. Maybe a little humor. Wisdom, or the appearance of it. I am here as a journalist but I am also here as a husband, a father and a citizen. That is the four part harmony of my life and they are complementary parts. I am incomplete if any one is missing. I am also a child of the second half of the Twentieth Century. I was born in 1940 and my earliest memories are of the pain and the glories of World War II. I came of age with the threat of nuclear war in the world -- and great innocence at home. I stood on the front lines of the battle for civil rights and I am haunted still by the personal and political price this nation paid in Vietnam. I can tell you when I first heard Elvis and when I first saw the Beatles. One president was assassinated, another was forced to resign, communism fell. Women in America began to take their rightful place. The American family began to take on new forms, alas, too often to the detriment of family members and society. I was raised on the prairie and I am at home under the bright lights of big cities. It was a time of momentous change -- mind boggling, world altering, exhilarating, disorienting change. And it was merely an overture for your generation. The sound you hear is a new century, coming on fast, with changes and challenges not yet imagined. A laser light show of new technology, changed expectations, new players, infinite possibilities. This is your time -- the Twenty-first Century, the millennium. It is yours to shape and master. It makes my heart race. I envy you. Moreover, you have at your disposal a dazzling assortment of new tools not even imagined not so long ago. The "gee whiz" tools of communications and information -- cable television, satellites, cell phones, pages, faxes and, of course, the king of them all, the personal computer. A spell-binding galaxy of chips, binaries, codes, nets, bytes and bits all lighting up the information super-highway with infinitely more stimuli than all the strobe lights at all the heavy metal concerts in the world. E-mail and cats rooms, virtual reality and all color graphics, software, hardware and caller waiting. Who could ask for anything more? Well, a modest suggestion as you lead us into the new century and new age of information overload -- data exchange and 1-800-HELP from the fast lane of this new infobahn. This will be the cyberspace equivalent of a teenage joyride -- reckless and pointless -- unless we all apply the first lesson of technological revolution to this one. They almost all have unexpected consequences and they are most successful when as much effort and thought is applied to the use of the technology as to the development of it in the first place. If this new technology becomes simply another means of amusing ourselves, or speeding the transactions of commerce or communicating simply for the sake of communication, than we will have failed. If this new technology becomes primarily the province of the privileges, leaving the underclass to wander in cyber-wilderness, then we will have failed. If it becomes merely an instrument or greater invasion into our personal lives, then we will have failed. That is always the most profound challenge attached to the development of any new technology -- wise use. The test of whether it is a greater good rather than a greater harm to society. This is your technology. Indeed, with the introduction of the Cyber Age we have fundamentally altered a relationship between generations. This is the first time the kids have taught their parents to drive. It's where we're headed that concerns me. One of my principal passions is the environment and biological diversity. Cyber technology is a great vehicle for information exchange, mapping and research. But if we become a nation of shut-ins, more engrossed in a virtual rain forest that the real thick, steamy, green, vibrant, living breathing experience we will be poorer for it. I can now float American rivers and climb mountains on a CD Rom and talk to Everest Base Camp on a Web site. But the passions I have about preserving these wonders of nature come from breathing them in, feeling the currents, struggling against the rock and snow, by the utter humility I feel in the midst. For all of its capacity, this new technology also is of little use in solving what I believe is the most vexing issue in American life: race. There is no software to show us the way, no delete button for bigotry. We may be color bind as we surf the net, but, alas, on the street, in the workplace, in our homes and social life, we-- more than we care to acknowledge-- see life through a prism of pigmentation. We are doing better, I grew up in apartheid America. Now we have the laws of the land, the richer tapestry of ethnic achievement and prominence, people of courage on all sides of the racial dynamic. We are increasingly a land of many colors, a geography of Asian, Latino and African Hues against a diminishing backdrop of white European stock. If we allow racism, expressed either as utter bigotry or dressed up as excessive ethnic pride, to metastasize at the current rates, we'll soon find ourselves at an incurable stage, unable to build walls high enough, schools private enough, Industries insulated enough to withstand the ravages of racism. It requires instead that most basic and yet most vexing human condition: an open mind and an open heart. That can be your legacy. You can lead this nation out of the quagmire of racial hostility, envy and oppression. All of you, for racism is not a province of one group alone. It is hard work. It will require initiative and courage. It requires good will all along the racial spectrum, it cannot be one way. And it is not easy. It goes well beyond good intentions or individual behavior. It requires the enlistment of heart, mind and friends to claim the higher ground together. Otherwise we are defined by the lowest common denominators among us. If they set then face the rhythms of life, we lose our way. If we fail to engage each other first in a dialogue and then in a commitment to standards of excellence, if we fail to honor and encourage tolerance, if we fail to honor honor, if we fail to make the common welfare central to our individual dreams, we will have fail ourselves and others who still look to us to show the way. We seem at the moment to be caught in a cycle of easy and cheap distractions. Celebrity has been at once devalued and raised to an artificially high place in our popular culture. Never mind achievement or worth that stands the test of time. A moment in the spotlight of television is life itself for dysfunctional families willing to share their sordid secrets on daytime talks shows; for parents to put their youngsters in the cockpits of small planes on stormy days; for performers to reach ever further into the universe of the outrageous to make an impression; for producers and editors to succumb to the easy temptations of titillation rather than intellectual provocation. And we encourage that by our amusement or benign attention. Is that how we want to be measured in the closing days of the 20th century, what has been called the American century? When we find ourselves drifting into the final presidential election of this century, neither engaged nor demanding of the process or the principals. There is no greater symbol of what has been achieved for the last 50 years. Communism, even in the mother land of Moscow, could not compete with free choice at the polls or in the marketplace. It is what gave the brave people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, South Africa hope. The durability and continuity of the American system of choosing our political leaders on schedule and in a peaceful fashion even as we were undergoing great societal and political upheaval, even as the White House was the center if a great constitutional crisis over the office of president. If we're not happy with the choices or the issues, we cannot leave them to those who are interested merely in exploitation of their narrow beliefs, wherever they sit on the political spectrum. We cannot abandon the process to the manipulators of media and image. We're better than that, or we should be. I've watched this county go from the vanilla '50s to the psychedelic '60s to the disco '70s, to the greedy '80s. Now, into the uncertain '90s, what worries me most is the enduring cynicism in our land about the separation from the traditional institutions of public life -- city hall, state house, especially Washington. And I cannot remember a time when there was such recognition that the traditional framework of society -- of family and faith and community and responsibility and accountability -- that framework was in such desperate need of repair. Your immediate concerns, understandably, are jobs and careers and relationships. Indeed. They will remain your primary focus for they are about personal happiness and survival. However, your legacy, the means by which your time will be measured, will be the values that you embrace, the care that you show for each other. Yours can be the age of tolerance and understanding. And it should be gender as well as ethnic. Young men, these young women who sit beside you are in passage of historic proportions. You should share their excitement and encourage their determination. You should come to know their world. Moreover, you must know that fathering a child is a daily and lifetime commitment. Young women, you must remember that life is also about proportion and choosing balance: a balance between a professional life and a personal life. You must remember that motherhood is not incidental to a life of fulfillment. To the young men and women together of the Class of 1996, know this: there will be no richer life than the one that you lead together with common values and common respect for each gender's special qualities. And to be true to the meaning of this institution and the purpose of education, I urge you to remember the counsel of the late Bartlett Giammatti, Yale President, Major League Baseball Commissioner and Renaissance man. In a setting quite like this in a lesser-known Eastern institution he said, "You must know that idealism is not a paralyzing but a liberating force and that to strive for principles, even if the journey is never completed, is to tape a vast source of energy, the energy to commit to your best in the brief, precious time that each of us is blessed to have." Fifty years ago -- 1946 -- another generation of young Americans marked a special spring in their lives. Together with the British, other western allies and especially the RUssians they had just won the war against Hitler and Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan. They had saved the world. They were born in the roaring Twenties and they came of age in the Great Depression when all the bleak and without much hope. They left their homes, many for the first time, and went thousands of miles away to fight -- often hand to hand in primitive conditions -- history's greatest war machine. They won. They came home and they built the America we know today. They kept the peace. They went to college in historic proportions, they married and had families. They built great industries and small businesses. They gave us great universities and great highway systems. They integrated America. They discovered new cures and gave us new songs. They rebuilt their enemies -- and stood tall against new adversaries in Moscow and Beijing. And they didn't whine or whimper. I am in awe of them. Fifty years from now let another commencement speaker stand here and say of your generation, "They saved their world. I am in awe of them." This is your time. Take it on. Don't be afraid to lean into the wind, love the Earth in all of its natural glories, take care of each other. We're counting on you.