Hillary Rodham and Senator Edwin Brooke, May 31, 1969
To test my hypothesis, I dug into an old trunk in my
basement to find the text of the student address I gave a few days later at my
graduation from The George Washington University. That evening, the main speaker was Senator
Edmund Muskie. (Picture below, with Senator Muskie, June 8, 1969)
I did not challenge
Senator Muskie by name; rather, I sought to challenge my fellow students –
along with our entire society. While I
find some of my phrasing a bit hokey, tied to the idioms of the period, and
while I would write it a bit differently now (I now think that our Vietnam Era foreign
policy problems were more the fault of our civilian leaders and the defense
industry than they were the military itself; and I would have been clearer that
it was not just seeds of racism that were planted centuries ago, but that much
of our country was based on racism – our country’s Original Sin, as I called it
in a student newspaper column the previous year), I would like to believe that it is a 46-year
look back to my essential self.
Anyway, I re-keyboarded it, and copy it here for my own
family posterity. Anyone else interested
to reading it, is of course, free to do so.
GWU Student
Commencement Speech (David Fishback), June 8, 1969
Today we receive diplomas
from a university. The world appears far different from the time, only a few
years ago, when we were handed diplomas by our high school principals.
The
world of 1964 and '65 was bright and optimistic. A few cities had erupted, but
that was, we were told, a small side product of realistically rising
expectations. The Government was sending some men to fight in a war in
Southeast Asia, but that was, we were told, a small price to pay for the preservation
of "freedom" in Asia. The Nation was making ready to uproot the last
vestiges of injustice in what was to become a Great Society.
Somehow
we did not make it. A portion of our population is in incipient rebellion, not
because of simple rising expectations, but because of disgust and anger and
continued oppression. The intervention in Asia has devastated a small
land whose people, faced with authoritarianism from all sides, must only desire peace; the brutality of this now
clearly senseless war has not only crippled the people of Vietnam, but has and
continues to tear our own nation apart. And
rather than working to eliminate injustice, the Nation seems paralyzed in any
attempts to deal with any problems.
It
would be ludicrous to speak of ourselves as young people now entering the
society: We have been in it for quite awhile. Some of us are extremely
sensitive to the crises around us; some of us are relatively unconcerned. But
the War and the draft and the domestic upheavals prevent any of us from being
completely oblivious to them -- and perhaps that is a silver lining. To the
extent we are born into a
society, we have no responsibility for its shortcomings; but to the extent we live in it, we have total
responsibility. The results of racism, poverty, and militarism threaten to
explode or decay our society beyond repair.
Some
say that the problems can be solved simply by stern measures to maintain order:
To keep protesting people in their place, to give them no choice but to
play in the game, albeit with a stacked deck. That is no solution: As
John Kennedy so wisely pointed out, "Those who make change impossible make
revolution inevitable."
But
then others say that revolution is what we need: By revolution here is
meant complete overthrow of the existing order, which, in the context of the
conditions in this country, can only be done by violence. In our society this
approach is dubious at its best, catastrophic at its worst: A repressive
fascistic counter-revolution
would be virtually certain, and even if it were not, the dynamics of violent
revolution lead almost inexorably to authoritarian or totalitarian regimes --
and such regimes, by their very nature, are likely to be most oppressive in
industrialized and heterogeneous societies like ours.
Nor
will the crises of our time "blow over." The seeds of racism
were planted in this country hundreds of years ago and its trees grew and
multiplied: Today racism's poisonous fruit, which has always sickened our
society, threatens to kill it. Poverty,
closely tied to racism, but going beyond it, has become clearer in its
inequities: People are increasingly unlikely to tolerate conditions of
poverty imposed by circumstances beyond their control. The increasing influence
of the military has led us into a catastrophic wake and could easily, if
unchecked, lead us -- by sheer momentum -- to more such wars, harming ourselves
and others and taking us down the road to a nuclear holocaust.
So
the alternatives are clear: We either find humanitarian solutions to
these crises or the crises will plunge us downward into an abyss of right or
left wing authoritarianism or total annihilation. A social, economic, and
political system can survive only if it meets the needs of its people. If our
system does not deliver, it will die.
Our
society, for all its grave deficiencies, has much to offer and has great
potential: Prosperity, rich diversity, respect for human rights are possible within its broadest outlines. Shifts – fundamental shifts -- within the
system will be required, and we must not shrink from that change.
A
very natural question at this point is, "What power have I to change
things?" The answer I would give is that very few people have power
as individuals. But, as we are molded in large numbers by our society, in large numbers we have the capacity to
mold the society in turn. People's attitudes create the climate of opinion in
which change can take place; and the ballot box is still the ultimate
repository of power. But public opinion is only a potent force if it is
organized: To that end we must "get our heads in place,"
"get ourselves together" to organize for change.
Youth
is always proclaimed to be the wave of the future. Well, we're it. In the final
analysis it will be us and people like us who will determine whether this
nation descends into more chaos and more repression or whether it develops into
a truly just and truly free society. It is our
responsibility -- the responsibility of each and every one of us.
David Fishback, Advocacy Chair of the Metro DC Chapter of PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), is a long-time activist who draws from his Jewish roots in advocating for social justice.
