Graduation Address

"Different Paths of a Common Goal" (12 October 1967). (UA Case 69, Box 1)

I think it's marvelous that we're all here today. I think it shows how attached you are to the University, that those of you who are here today are not watching television or listening to the radio and listening to the baseball game. And I'm very appreciative. All I can do is promise you that my speech will be short. But l'm very grateful to come here.

Max Aitken has been a long-time friend of the Kennedy family, and he was a great friend of President Kennedy. And l have long been an admirer of his, as I was of his father, who has so much to do with this University, and who was a great friend of my father's, and also a great friend of President Kennedy.

There were more people, I think, from New Brunswick and representing the Maritime areas in the State of Massachusetts than any other part of the world.

And it's the first time it's been disclosed but I think Lord Beaverbrook played a very important role in my brother's election in 1952 to the United States Senate. He took an active interest and I think that he and those of you who were friendly at that time made it a matter of some importance to your relatives in Massachusetts to vote for John Kennedy. So we're very grateful.

It is always an honor to receive a degree from a great university. But this is a day of special pride for me. It was just ten years ago, at your Fall Convocation, that John Kennedy was presented with an honorary Doctors of Law degree at this same ceremony.

Much has changed in the last ten years. And at this University your Chancellor, Lord Beaverbrook, has gone. But his contributions to the Province of New Brunswick, and to this University, remain. The art gallery; the playhouse; the town hall auditoriums, have enriched the cultural life of New Brunswick. And the Librarv, the Gymnasium, the Pool that Max Aitken opened today are going to make great contributions and continue to make great contributions to this University, the people of New Brunswick and to the people of Canada. Lord Beaverbrook was a man of firm conviction and he expressed those convictions forcefully. But whatever one's disagreements were with individual positions that he might have taken, no one will deny that he left a rewarding legacy to the Province of New Brunswick – to its University – and I think beyond that, to all English-speaking people all over the globe. I think the world is better that Lord Beaverbrook lived.

Your nation has also changed much in the last ten years. Your natural resources have been fused with a great outpouring of energy by the people of Canada, to create one of the most vibrant and successful economies of the whole world. Industrial production has increased by more than 50 percent; you exchange more that 20 billion dollars worth of goods with the rest of the world; and you have fueled this growth with new sources of energy – including the advanced nuclear plants at Rolphton and Douglas Point.

But if Canada – and the United States – have changed in the last ten years, these changes have dramatized the links that bind us together. For Canada, like the United States, is a land of great wealth and of great enterprise. Canada, like the United States, is one of those tiny handful of nations confronted not with the crisis of physical survival, but with the dilemmas of modern affluence. And Canada, like the United States, is coming to realize that the accumulation of material wealth will not fulfill the promise of our national lives – or the desires of our own human spirits.

We in the United States are sometimes thought of as the most affluent of all the nations of the globe. You in Canada are rapidly advancing to the same equal peak of material prosperity. But we have found, in our own country, that the statistics of modern progress perhaps count the wrong things; for the forms of the new wealth seem to destroy as many pleasures as they bring.

We have revolutionized our lives with electricity – but the power plants pollute our air. Our industry continues to grow, continues to swell the Gross National Product – but it also turns rivers into sewers, and lakes to swamps.

And as our wealth increases, so also does the pace and the complexity of our national existence. We crowd into cities; we spill out into chaotic, and unplanned suburbs; and link the two with ribbons of concrete, desecrating the landscape and poisoning the air. We confront a society composed of giants of huge, impersonal corporations, bureaucratic universities, centralized government, in which the solitary, individual man too often goes unrecognized and unheard.

But as all these problems come to the United States, so do they come to all of the industrialized nations of the world in the larger society that we call the West; and so they will and so they are now confronting Canada.

Just the other day I saw in an American newspaper a photograph of a woman, weeping outside the house that she lived in for years. It had been condemned as part of an urban renewal project. It was stark testimony to a system of remote and impersonal government. It is a picture we have seen in the United States for twenty years. But this photograph was taken in Canada.

Thus we are destined to share the burdens as well as the benefits of modern life. We share in the shape of our societies; with the sure knowledge that all our great common enterprises will come to little if we cannot rebuild and reinforce the importance of the individual man; to gain for ourselves and for our children the opportunity to live as the Greeks defined happiness: "the exercise of vital powers along the lines of excellence in a life affording them scope."

And even as we share this crisis of prosperity within our two nations, so do we look out upon a common horizon abroad. For we face a troubled and a turbulent world; a world full of a new kind of revolution. This is not a revolution of ideology. It is a revolution for individual dignity, in societies where the individual is submerged in a desperate mass. It is a revolution for self-sufficiency, in societies which have been forced to rely on another, stronger nation - our nation - for everything from their manufactured goods to their education. And it is a revolution to bring hope to their children; the generation of young people who live in lands where the average wage may be 75 cents a day, as in Latin America, or $100 a year, as in Africa. These are children who live without doctors and without medicine. Seven out of ten children in thousands of Latin American villages die before they reach their first birthday and half of the people who are buried in Latin America each year are under the age of four. These are the children who, if they live, face only the prospect of wretched, weary lives; lives of endless toil, without joy, without purpose, and without hope.

This is the world that we confront today: a world which is an affront to our spirit, to the spirit of this University. For whatever political beliefs we hold, whatever our wish for the world of the future, there is to all men of goodwill a monstrous disproportion in our existence today – dieting while others starve, buying millions of cars each year while most of the world goes without shoes, islands of affluence in a sea of poverty.

So we must reorganize what we must do – and what we cannot do. We cannot rest, apathetic and indifferent, prospering while others starve. We cannot have peaceful progress – if all around us nations and people are in chaos and are in agony.

But more than this, we must act to honor the best within our heritage. Throughout history, the boundaries of great empires have faded and have dissolved, their cities have fallen into decay, and their wealth has vanished.

What remains for them is what they stood for, what they did for other people. What remains is the contribution that they made to the unity and to the knowledge, to the understanding and to the compassion of man. What remains is what they added to the hopes and well-being of human civilization and it its hope for the future.

What will endure of our own civilization, of Canada and the United States, will not be the wars that we won, the weapons that we built, or the wealth that we accumulated. It will be what we can accomplish of the hope of a great political philosopher, Thomas Jefferson, who said, that "we are pointing the way to struggling nations who wish like us to emerge from their own tyrannies also" – not only political tyranny, but the despots of poverty and of fear and if ignorance. It will be whether we can break out of the terrible paradox that in an age of unbounded human possibility, men should hate and kill and want to destroy one another.

For we must dissolve the attitudes which permit men to indulge those passions which keep the world in constant conflict. There have been more than seventy wars since the end of World War II: yet this chaos has not induced us to make much progress in reducing our capacity for nuclear destruction, which could make each momentary crisis the last crisis for all mankind, and we cannot do this by ourselves. Yet we can show increased understanding for the fears and the suspicions of others and take occasional risks in the name of peace in preference to the monumental risks in mounting arms.

Nor is the peace we seek mere inaction or the absence of war. "Peace", said President Kennedy, "is a process – a way of solving problems". Thus peace for us means building new forms of political and economic institutions, which the smallness and the terror of our whole world requires that we do.

But all of this commitment – in the peace and the progress of the world – also requires restraint, and it also requires understanding. For we cannot impose any rigid pattern, any single solution, on the diverse peoples of the world. Nations, like men, often march to the beat of different drummers; it is our role to help those nations achieve their own goals of political justice, national independence, and increasing human freedom – not to condition the help we have to offer on their allegiance to our own political lights.

These tasks – this commitment – this restraint - are awesome challenges in the years ahead. And there are those who question whether the energy and the will to meet these challenges is present in our land. Our answer, in my judgment, is to rely on youth – the world's hope. The world demands the qualities of youth. This is not a time of life, but a state of mind; a temper of the will; a quality of imagination; the predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.

Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the world I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their concerns, their values and their hopes for the future. I have seen students in South Africa, risking position and daring imprisonment against the awesome power of a garrison state. In Peru and Chile, I have seen students leaving the civilization of their university and of the city, to the danger and the disease and the squalor of the countryside, seeking justice and progress for the peasants who have never shared in the life of their country.

And in this task, the youth of Canada have a vital role to play. For you are among the few nations whose youth has been educated, and who can teach others the skills they need to lead lives of dignity and purpose. Canada stands, with the United States, with Europe, with Japan, in that small group of lands which do not fight a daily battle simply to stay alive.

You of Canada’s younger generation have already begun this work. Through the Canadian University Service Overseas – an inspiration for our Peace Corps - more than 900 Canadians serve abroad, helping to teach the peoples of Africa, and Asia, and Latin America – just as the Company of Young Canadians is working here in your own land. But much more needs to be done – and among your students are thousands who can bring hope into lands that know none.

But there are dangers in this commitment – and there are dangers that you must face and there are dangers that must be overcome.

First, is the danger of futility; the belied that there is nothing that one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills – against misery and against ignorance, against injustice or against violence. Yet many of the world’s great movements, of thought and of action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young Italian explorer discovered the new world, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was the 32 year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal.

"Give me a place to stand, and I can move the world," said Archimedes. These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history to itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

The second great danger is that of expediency; of those who say that hopes and beliefs must bend before immediate necessity. Of course, if we would act effectively we must deal with the world as it is. We must get things done. But if there was one thing that President Kennedy stood for that touched the most profound feelings of young people all over the globe, it was the belief that idealism, high aspirations and deep convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programs – that there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibilities – no separation between the deepest desires of heart and mind and the rational application of human effort to human problems. It is not realistic or hard-headed to solve problems and to take action unguided by ultimate moral aims and moral values. It is thoughtless folly. For it ignores the realities of human faith and passion and belief; forces ultimately more powerful than all the calculation of economists and of generals. Of course to adhere to standards, to idealisms, to vision, in the face of immediate dangers takes courage and self-confidence. But we also know that only those who dare to fail greatly, can achieve greatly.

For the fortunate nations like Canada and the United States, the third great danger is comfort; the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of an education. But that is not the road that history has marked out for us. There is a Chinese curse which says, "May he live in interesting times." Like it or not we live in interesting times. They are tinges of danger and they are times of uncertainty; but they are also open to the creative energy of man, more open than at any other time in this history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged, and more importantly, will ultimately judge himself, on the effort that he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and his goals have shaped that effort.

You come from a nation whose Prime Minister holds a Nobel Prize for his work in bringing peace to a war-ravaged land; a nation whose work abroad has been a living testament to man' s longing for peace; a land whose people have put their energy and their wisdom to the task of a world in which human freedom is enlarged, and peace preserved. Now you must turn to the work of building a newer world – a world which will be better for the work that you do. And this you must do.

Albert Camus once said :

"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children suffer. But we can lessen the number of suffering children. And if you do not help us do this, who will do this?"

This is the question that the young graduates of this University must ask themselves. I am convinced of the answer.