Good morning. I want to extend a heartfelt welcome and congratulations to the December 2012 graduating class of Fort Lewis College. Congratulations on your achievement. It is the culmination of several years of hard work, stress, not a few tears. In just a few minutes you will seal the door on your undergraduate education and will enter the door to your future. I am charged with the task of delivering a few parting words and I am honored to have the privilege to speak to you. I have worked with many of you and have watched you surmount obstacles of intellect, confidence, and of course, time management. You have risen above these obstacles.
I look across the crowd and I see a corps of faces flush with pride, eagerness, and nervousness. Trust that this last feeling is not unusual, in fact, it is how most people feel when they are about to embark on something extraordinary and important. You are equipped with the knowledge and skills of your designated profession. I expect that you will seek out and achieve professional success. I believe that you will define and redefine personal happiness and set your sights on maintaining. I trust that you will find your own professional ways. I would like to address some things to consider as you embark on your future journeys and join the world’s community.
Yours is a unique generation. You arrive at adulthood with special skills and sensitivities. You demonstrate a lust for life and a drive for adventure. I am elated that you are about to join the adult world, fully capable and in possession of an idealism that believes that positive change possible and necessary. Up close and from a distance I see that you are a generation interested in healing the world. You are members of a group less concentrated on material wealth and more focused on the satisfaction and the well-being of others. You are a generation poised with the skills, knowledge and compassion to make a difference. I have been waiting for you.
As you know, you enter a complicated world. This is a world rife with differences. We strive for equality and often fall far short as one’s equality by today’s definitions is predicated on the denial of another’s. We have created so many identity categories designed to empower but instead have divided. Because of our class, our race, our ethnicity, our religion, our gender, our sexuality, and our age. We learn from scholars and pundits across academia and the media that we are so different and that our differences are impregnable. We live and leisure, vote and vault, work and wail along xenophobic lines. You enter a world where we live by a rhetoric of difference and distance. It is an “us” or “them” mentality. The world you enter understands that a finite amount of power exists and we encourage a grab understanding that less for someone else means more for us. Rights for some and for others withheld. Whether we are striving for or experiencing comfort we must keep in mind that rights denied to one are rights denied to all. We have been waiting for you.
Every generation before you is tasked with a profound responsibility—and that is to leave the world better than you found it. Before you, generations in the United States have grappled with political rights, land rights, water rights, worker’s rights, women’s rights, civil rights, and immigrant rights. Your generation has before it a similar task. In fact, it is a culmination of a legacy that your ancestors have fought, died, and been memorialized for. This legacy represents the most important social justice issue of all, that of human rights and I believe we have arrived at a crucial axis of time where for the first time in history we can secure human rights for all.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to the success of achieving human rights for all rests in an ignorance of its definition. If you ask someone about the definition of human rights they will list “freedom of speech” and maybe another few from the Bill of Rights. Beyond that they seemed stumped. How can we pursue this task without a concrete, understandable, agreed upon, and most importantly, achievable definition? First, human rights are based on the principle of respect for the individual. It is a fundamental assumption that each person is a moral and rational being who deserves to be treated with dignity. Human rights are universal. Human rights are the rights to which everyone is entitled regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, and region. These are rights extended to everyone because they are alive. The concept of human rights stretches back to antiquity and throughout the subsequent generations of philosophers and citizens have debated the topic—arguing for its importance but somehow confounded by a definition and in a world of differing social, economic, and political values and systems, perplexed on how to move beyond the theoretical to the material. After World War II and the catastrophic events that befell the world’s people, a formal document was constructed and adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948. Within this monumental document, it listed thirty rights to which all people are entitled. Spearheaded by Eleanor Roosevelt, she argued that this document existed as the international “Magna Carta” for all of mankind. Rights include the ideas that we are all born free and equal, that we have the right to life, that we should not be subject to slavery or torture, that we are equal before the law, that our human rights travel with you wherever we go and are protected by law, that we are innocent till proven guilty, that we possess the right to privacy, the freedom to move, the right to asylum, the right to marriage and family, the right to a nationality, the right to ownership, the freedoms of thought and expression, the rights to assemble publicly, to democracy, and to social security. These rights also ensure workers’ rights and the right to play. These rights guarantee rights to food and shelter, education, a fair and free world, the right to responsibility, and most importantly, that no one can take away your human rights. And so now you know the definition and now I believe that it is time to commit now and for the rest of your time on earth to the project of human rights.
Such a task is not without its challenges. According to Former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan the challenges to human rights include poverty and global inequities, discrimination, armed conflict and violence, impunity, democracy deficits, and weak institutions. He further enumerates the challenges of implementation. These include a knowledge gap, a capacity gap, a commitment gap, and a security gap. I believe that from this moment you have the ability to overcome these challenges and gaps. The formal knowledge gained in your classes and internships as well as the also important informal knowledge gleaned from your experience amongst your peers, the compassionate reaction to human suffering that your generation has uniquely chosen as one of its reigning sensitivities, and your willingness to accept less so that people may have more are solid foundations for the success of human rights.
Perhaps you are feeling a bit fatigued by this topic—maybe your inclination is to say “its too big,” “what can I do,” or more likely “I am afraid and I don’t know how.” It is truly overwhelming to tackle this leviathan. But I believe that human rights are the responsibility of every generation. It is a topic that requires your never ending vigilance and you must hold human rights violators accountable and seek to implement national and international policy ensuring the safety of human rights. I believe that you, the Fort Lewis College graduate have arrived at the very moment where we can actually accomplish the delivery and securing of human rights for the world’s 7.056 billion inhabitants. Ah you say, human rights again and always. Again spoken of and always abandoned as the road to achieving human rights ends up looking and feeling like an unsolvable matrix. I firmly believe that if we approach the world’s violence and inequality through a human rights perspective, much of the world’s violence can be eliminated/ eradicated. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its 30 articles describing the rights set the blueprint for our action and our ideology. So what can you do? First, you can accept the and live by the concept of human rights and weave it into the very fiber of your being. This is perhaps the hardest obstacle. You have to accept that all humans possess certain rights regardless of whether you share their heritage, their ideological frameworks, and their physicality. One need not pass “your” litmus test to be entitled to human rights. Many of us cannot bridge international issues but you can ensure that your communities value human rights. Using a very local approach, investigate the ways in which people and populations around you lack human rights. Challenge paradigms and policies that deny rights to people based on culture, class, gender, and sexuality. Figure out how you can individually alter their realities by restoring their rights. Convince the people that you work, pray, play, and love with that they should become involved in and live the human rights principle. Second, you can demand that human rights be a part of educational curricula at all levels of formal and informal education. Demand that goals for primary, secondary, and higher education be substantially devoted to the project of these rights. Third, you must report human rights violations, regardless of how large or small. Fourth, if you know that violations are taking place then you must reserve a portion of your life to fighting the assaults on human rights. You decide how and when but you cannot ignore the violations. To ignore is to tacitly sanction the injuries of fellow human beings. Finally, you must include in your civic agenda attention to human rights. Avoid the potential narrowness of focusing solely on national rights and identities. Rather, draw back the microscope and see that you can accomplish a great deal with your attention and action. See how those of different nations and cultures enrich your world and know that fighting for everyone’s rights is fighting for your very own. This big blue ball connects all of us as we pursue our lives with dignity and love.
Why you? Why now? Because we have arrived to a time where we are witnessing some of the worst human rights abuses known to humankind. Our world seems adept at sustaining old and creating new forms of violence against bodies, minds, and spirits. We use technologies of fear and ideologies of hate to convince each other that one’s gain is surely another ones loss. It is a sad state of affairs. No wonder throngs of us retreat into our homes, anxiety cloaking us like a blanket, steeled against emotions, ignoring the news now coming at us every second of every day for fear of the crushing blow of reality. But I am not distressed, yet I know there is much work to be done.
Our world is in crisis, yes it always seems to be in crisis, this appears to be a symptom of the human condition. But never before have we witnessed such a constellation of human crises around the world and down our streets. And right behind those crises are ordinary people moved to do acts of heroism. They stepped forward because there was no step backward that they could take. They bit down, swallowed hard and spoke with a steady voice and persuasive action. Gaza and the West Bank erupt around us but then Avigdor Feldman, noted lawyer in Israel and trusted by both Palestinians and Jews, tirelessly advocates for justice. Burma, later Myanmar erupted in violence and for decades and Aung San Suu Kyi tepped forward, experienced violence and existed for years under house arrest all the while demanding democracy. Despicable racism plagued the South in civic and social spaces and Lawrence Guyot stepped forward to become the director of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and SNCC-CORE chapters in Mississippi and later imprisoned in the infamous and violent prison Parchman Farm. Through his illnesses and until his recent death, he fought racism. Ingrid Washinawatok, a member of the Menominee Nation worked until her untimely death at age 41 championing the rights of the world’s indigenous populations. Will D. Campbell whose work, among others lifelong acts on behalf of civil rights for soldiers, receivers of the death penalty, and African-Americans, Brother to a Dragonfly inspires us to reexamine how hatred and revenge of any form hurts inhibits the humanity and human rights of the victims and the perpetrators. To Guyot and Will, a personal thanks for your guidance, humor, and the ways when I fell, I felt your arms hoisting me up and setting me back on my feet with the shoves to propel me forward.
In your minds, replace fear with force and instead of the question make it a declaration of “what can I do” Your response must be “something,” “anything,” “everything!” You must never doubt your own capabilities, bravery, and innovation. As the sages have said before me, “To save one person is to save a nation.” There are no small acts when it comes human rights. Each act reminds me of the “butterfly effect.” Across time and space, your acts on behalf of human rights stretch across times and landscapes. Our heroes, your heroes were quite ordinary until they were called to do something extraordinary. They began with the same fear, confusion, and intimidation that you might feel. Like them, you simply have no choice, you must assume the mantle of human rights as my generation and those before me discover that their strategies’ are lost in translation and are therefore less effective, their footsteps clomp less loudly, their booming and thunderous speeches and proclamation grow raspy with age, their intertwined arms loosen from muscle fatigue. They fear not because they know you have arrived. With their minds, heartbeats, and footsteps, they keep the path visible for you. They have been waiting for you.
I have had the honor and privilege of teaching you. I look at all of you and I see the very real possibility that you can make a difference. Let me explain. I have observed from vantage points and this has afforded me unobstructed views to the Fort Lewis student. The most visible scene and loudest narrative where professors and students focused on content and theories but what about the other narratives and expressions present in the classroom, in the offices, labs, studios and all through the campus? It is in these hidden spaces that you have demonstrated the capacity and were developing the very traits necessary to tackle the issue of human rights, to bring violence and hatred to its knees, and to replace it with freedom. First, is the deep sensitivity and compassion you have for others. Convert your valuable yearning to value and need other people, both alike and different from yourselves to a successful human rights campaign. And you my dear students are capable. You possess the knowledge and skills gained from hard work at this liberal arts institution, the compassion gained from intense study, observation, and experience, the bravery from those that have treaded this long, frustrating and difficult road and d from those risks taken by you and succeeded. We have been waiting for you.
Honor your previous generations’ attempts, successes, and groundwork laid down in the name of human rights. Rebuke the histories of those who denied human rights to anyone. The beauty of life means we are shaped but not imprisoned by our past. You are now holders of that legacy—the violence and peace. You must know that you can do this. So as you embark on your professional careers, eager to succeed, driven to create families and communities that provide you with comfort and security, I ‘d like you to continue the journey away from previous generations’ inward focus. I’d like you to carry with you a deep understanding and commitment to human rights. Convert the knowledge and effort that you have put into your education over the past several years and strive to work on behalf of your communities—from the local to the global. Comfort is relative. What good is that hard-earned education if it is not put to use? To sacrifice another’s rights, is to sacrifice one’s own. So as you ponder today’s accomplishment, remember on this day the subject of human rights. Remember to be vigilant, each time you fall down, catch your breath, dust yourself off, stand and lock arms with others. Approach the securing of human rights with grace, dignity, righteousness, bravery, compassion, and of course, intellect. Welcome to the struggle, link your arms, raise your voices and we await your success.