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发表于 2016-7-12 22:54:32
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Lincoln’s Springfield speech also suggests what is so great and so good
about the people whoinhabit this lucky and exquisite country of ours (that’s the
world you now inherit): our work ethic,our restlessness, our innovation and our
improvisation, our communities and our institutions ofhigher learning, our
suspicion of power; the fact that we seem resolutely dedicated to parsing
themeaning between individual and collective freedom; that we are dedicated to
understanding whatThomas Jefferson really meant when he wrote that inscrutable
phrase “the pursuit of Happiness.”
But ladies and gentlemen, the isolation of those two mighty oceans has also
helped to incubatehabits and patterns less beneficial to us: our devotion to
money and guns; our certainty – abouteverything; our stubborn insistence on our
own exceptionalism, blinding us to that which needsrepair, our preoccupation
with always making the other wrong, at an individual as well as globallevel.
And then there is the issue of race, which was foremost on the mind of
Lincoln back in 1838. It isstill here with us today. The jazz trumpeter Wynton
Marsalis told me that healing this question ofrace was what “the kingdom needed
in order to be well.” Before the enormous strides in equalityachieved in
statutes and laws in the 150 years since the Civil War that Lincoln correctly
predictedwould come are in danger of being undone by our still imperfect human
nature and by politicianswho now insist on a hypocritical color-blindness –
after four centuries of discrimination. Thatdiscrimination now takes on new,
sometimes subtler, less obvious but still malevolent forms today.The chains of
slavery have been broken, thank God, and so too has the feudal dependence
ofsharecroppers as the vengeful Jim Crow era recedes (sort of) into the distant
past. But now inplaces like – but not limited to – your other neighbors a few
miles as the crow flies from here inFerguson, we see the ghastly remnants of our
great shame emerging still, the shame Lincolnthought would lead to national
suicide, our inability to see beyond the color of someone’s skin. Ithas been
with us since our founding.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that immortal second sentence of the
Declaration that begins, “Wehold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal…,” he owned more than ahundred human beings. He never saw the
contradiction, he never saw the hypocrisy, and moreimportant never saw fit in
his lifetime to free any one of those human beings, ensuring as we wentforward
that the young United States – born with such glorious promise – would be
bedeviled byrace, that it would take a bloody, bloody Civil War to even begin to
redress the imbalance.
But the shame continues: prison populations exploding with young black men,
young black menkilled almost weekly by policemen, whole communities of color
burdened by corrupt municipalitiesthat resemble more the predatory company store
of a supposedly bygone era than a responsiblelocal government. Our cities and
towns and suburbs cannot become modern plantations.
It is unconscionable, as you emerge from this privileged sanctuary, that a
few miles from here –and nearly everywhere else in America: Baltimore, New York
City, North Charleston, Cleveland,Oklahoma, Sanford, Florida, nearly everywhere
else – we are still playing out, sadly, an utterlyAmerican story, that the same
stultifying conditions and sentiments that brought on our Civil Warare still on
such vivid and unpleasant display. Today, today. There’s nothing new under the
sun.
Many years after our Civil War, in 1883, Mark Twain took up writing in
earnest a novel he hadstarted and abandoned several times over the last
half-dozen years. It would be a different kind ofstory from his celebrated Tom
Sawyer book, told this time in the plain language of his Missouriboyhood – and
it would be his masterpiece.
Set near here, before the Civil War and emancipation, ‘the Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn’ is thestory of two runaways – a white boy, Tom Sawyer’s old
friend Huck, fleeing civilization, and a blackman, Jim, who is running away from
slavery. They escape together on a raft going down theMississippi.
The novel reaches its moral climax when Huck is faced with a terrible
choice. He believes he hascommitted a grievous sin in helping Jim escape, and he
finally writes out a letter, telling Jim’s ownerwhere her runaway property can
be found. Huck feels good about doing this at first, he says, andmarvels at “how
close I came to being lost and going to hell.”
But then he hesitates, thinking about how kind Jim has been to him during
their adventure. “…Somehow,” Huck says, “I couldn’t seem to strike no place to
harden me against him, but onlythe other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on
top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go onsleeping; and see how glad
he was when I come back out of the fog;…and such like times; andwould always
call me honey…and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he
alwayswas…”
Then, Huck remembers the letter he has written. “I took it up, and held it
in my hand,” he says. “Iwas a-trembling because I’d got to decide, forever,
betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied aminute, sort of holding my
breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right then, I’ll go to hell’ – and toreit
up.”
That may be the finest moment in all of American literature. Ernest
Hemingway thought all ofAmerican literature began at that moment.
Twain, himself, writing after the Civil War and after the collapse of
Reconstruction, a misunderstoodperiod devoted to trying to enforce civil rights,
was actually expressing his profounddisappointment that racial differences still
persisted in America, that racism still festered in thisfavored land, founded as
it was on the most noble principle yet advanced by humankind – that allmen are
created equal. That civil war had not cleansed our original sin, a sin we
continue toconfront today, daily, in this supposedly enlightened “post-racial”
time.
It is into this disorienting and sometimes disappointing world that you now
plummet, I’m afraid,unprotected from the shelter of family and school. You have
fresh prospects and real dreams and Iwish each and every one of you the very
best. But I am drafting you now into a new Union Armythat must be committed to
preserving the values, the sense of humor, the sense of cohesion thathave long
been a part of our American nature, too. You have no choice, you’ve been called
up,and it is your difficult, but great and challenging responsibility to help
change things and set usright again.
Let me apologize to you in advance on behalf of all the people up here. We
broke it, but you’vegot to fix it. You’re joining a movement that must be
dedicated above all else – career andpersonal advancement – to the preservation
of this country’s most enduring ideals. You have tolearn, and then re-teach the
rest of us that equality – real equality – is the hallmark and birthrightof ALL
Americans. Thankfully, you will become a vanguard against a new separatism that
seems tohave infected our ranks, a vanguard against those forces that, in the
name of our greatdemocracy, have managed to diminish it. Then, you can change
human nature just a bit, toappeal, as Lincoln also implored us, to appeal to
“the better angels of our nature.” That’s theobjective. And I know, I know you
can do it.
Ok. Rounding third.
Let me speak directly to the graduating class. (Watch out. Here comes the
advice.)
Remember: Black lives matter. All lives matter.
Reject fundamentalism wherever it raises its ugly head. It’s not civilized.
Choose to live in theBedford Falls of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” not its
oppressive opposite, Pottersville.
Do not descend too deeply into specialism. Educate all of your parts. You
will be healthier.
Replace cynicism with its old-fashioned antidote, skepticism.
Don’t confuse monetary success with excellence. The poet Robert Penn Warren
once warned methat “careerism is death.”
Try not to make the other wrong.
Be curious, not cool.
Remember, insecurity makes liars of us all.
Listen to jazz. A lot, a lot. It is our music.
Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all – not the car,
not the TV, not thecomputer or the smartphone.
Do not allow our social media to segregate us into ever smaller tribes and
clans, fiercely andsometimes appropriately loyal to our group, but also capable
of metastasizing into profounddistrust of the other.
Serve your country. By all means serve your country. But insist that we
fight the right wars.Governments always forget that.
Convince your government that the real threat, as Lincoln knew, comes from
within. Governmentsalways forget that, too. Do not let your government outsource
honesty, transparency or candor.Do not let your government outsource
democracy.
Vote. Elect good leaders. When he was nominated in 1936, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt said, “Betterthe occasional faults of a government that lives in a
spirit of charity than the consistent omissionsof a government frozen in the ice
of its own indifference.” We all deserve the former. And insist onit.
Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have
nothing to do with theactual defense of the country – they just make our country
worth defending.
Be about the “unum,” not the “pluribus.”
Do not lose your enthusiasm. In its Greek etymology, the word enthusiasm
means simply, “God inus.”
And even though lightning still isn’t distributed right, try not to be a
fool. It just gets Mark Twainriled up a bit.
And if you ever find yourself in Huck’s spot, if you’ve “got to decide
betwixt two things,” do theright thing. Don’t forget to tear up the letter. He
didn’t go to hell – and you won’t either.
So we come to an end of something today – and for you also a very special
beginning. God speedto you all.
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