The Ties of Citizenship
Commencement Address to Colorado Mesa University Class of 2018
Good morning, Mavericks! You could not have picked a more beautiful day for your graduation.
Thank you Vice President Marshall for those kind words. Let me also thank the Board of Trustees, the proud parents and families, and of course, the brilliant Class of 2018.
Graduates in this class have learned to work metals and polymers in the engineering lab; designed formula race cars in national competitions; studied higher dimensional cosmology and the biochemistry of shale; launched a reading program with local elementary schools; led hiking trips on the Monument through the Outdoor Program.
You’ve learned the best fishing holes in Grand Mesa and the best drink specials at Kannah Creek. In the last month alone, you survived a Stampede Rodeo. Lil’ Yachty. Finals. And now all you have to do is endure a commencement speech by a U.S. Senator. I’m not going to be long.
This morning, I want to draw your attention to the present. Specifically, to the duties you bear — not tomorrow, not next year — but today, as graduates of this great school and citizens of our republic.
As we consider the world around us, we can have an understandable tendency to imagine that it was all just inevitable. We forget our origins and replace what were actually historical contingencies with a presumption that human history moves inexorably in only one direction.
Our country’s Founders made no such presumption. They defied tyranny and led the first successful revolution against a colonial power. That same generation of Americans established a new Constitution and submitted it to the American people for ratification. No other republic of this size had sprung from a vote of the people.
No one participating in the debate over that Constitution could imagine the republic we now possess, let alone our size, wealth, and strength. Today, the United States has a population of 350 million — nearly 100 times our number in 1790. Today, our borders span from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Our economy is a driving force, affecting the productivity and wealth of the world’s nations. Our standing military, five branches of terrifying force, out powers all others.
Likewise, the Founders could not have imagined the extent of our democracy. The government they founded guarded against — even more than it empowered — direct participation of the people.
Under the government first established by the Constitution, voters chose only one branch of the government. The Founders would never have conceived the direct election of senators, or that states would give so much power to voters to select the president. They certainly would never have imagined the extent to which the vote is now shared by so many citizens, not just men with property. Some would be astonished that the United States ended the cruelty of human slavery. Others would be astonished that it took so long. Today, I think they would be riveted by our continuing struggle to fulfill the aspiration of the words they wrote, that all people are created equal . . . [and] endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . [including] Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Anyone in this stadium who doubts the allure of American citizenship should think upon the work of someone denied it.
Our list of Founders did not end in the 18th century; it extends to all those who followed. Those who sought the vote. Those who expected safety from lynch mobs and equal protection from the law. Those who knew they deserved the same working conditions granted to others. Those who were the first to attend a college like this one. The veterans who are here today. Those who stormed the beaches of Normandy and liberated concentration camps. Those who strived to see the lives of their children exceed the opportunities afforded to them by their parents and grandparents.
They too are founders of this country. And today, we must understand their victories as something other than historical accidents.
If the safer workplace won at the cost of 146 lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory…
If the opportunity to vote earned only after dogs and firehoses were set by citizens on their fellow citizens…
If the freedoms of speech or religion secured only after censorship and discrimination…
If these steps on the path to a fuller and better understanding of citizenship become just so many ticks on a timeline — to be studied in school, artifacts, even national monuments — then we as a nation run the risk of becoming blind to injustice, which should be, as Frederick Douglass wrote, our “business…with the present.”
A century after Douglass, Dr. King told us “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That is a comforting thought. But it can lead us to look back on our past for unearned permission to ignore what is wrong in the present — presuming it will be righted, not today, but in some other time and maybe by some other person.
In 1942, months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. The Order called for the War Relocation Authority to force Japanese-American citizens from their homes into prison-like camps. Some were located in rural Colorado.
Many Western governors opposed the camps at the time, not because they were unjust, but out of a cruel anti-Japanese prejudice. They were comfortable rounding up and locking down their fellow citizens, so long as they were locked up in someone else’s state. Some Coloradans in nearby communities gave way to a shameful fear of their fellow citizens and objected to their presence.
Colorado’s Governor at the time was Ralph Carr. His response reminds us what “our business…with the present” looks like. Speaking to a crowd of angry citizens, he said:
I am talking to … all American people whether their status be white, brown or black … when I say that if a majority may deprive a minority of its freedom, contrary to the terms of the Constitution today, then you as a minority may be subjected to the same ill-will of the majority tomorrow.
He went on to remind them that Japanese-Americans:
…are not going to take over the vegetable business of this state, and they are not going to take over the Arkansas Valley. But the Japanese are protected by the same Constitution that protects us. An American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen…. If you harm them, you must first harm me. I was brought up in small towns where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred.
“I grew to despise it,” Carr said, pointing to the crowd, “because it threatened the happiness of you and you and you.”
At that moment, the moral arc of the universe bent only because Ralph Carr chose to pull it. His example should also make us wonder what would have happened had he not been there.
Class of 2018, the ties of citizenship are demanding. Citizenship always balances between a generous approach to our aspirations, and the temptation to hoard them for ourselves. Citizenship is a bond of trust — that we will work out our differences and land on the side of generosity together, even as we know we will be somewhat disappointed from time to time with the outcomes as individuals.
The necessary give and take of citizenship is enacted now, in the present — not back in the good old days, and not later when things might be better.
I believe that give-and-take works best when we are face-to-face, obliged by proximity to regard the humanity and citizenship we share. Maybe I am nostalgic. I have found that, in the digital age especially, isolation from one another affords the convenience of diminishing one another, rather than aspiring to thrive together. For proof, look no further than my Facebook feed, which attracts routine vitriol and indignation. As an elected official, I accept my duty to receive input in this form. But after reading it for nearly a decade I can also say that we are not going to make a better future from that kind of engagement.
Mavs, I share all of this to remind you that our republic lives in the ties between us. And those ties live, not in a frozen past, but in the small choices we make every day.
From where I stand, all evidence tells me the Class of 2018 appreciates this. During your time at Mesa, you’ve raised thousands of dollars for young adults with life-threatening illnesses; comforted fellow citizens after the ravages of Hurricane Harvey; volunteered to help the parents of kids with special needs; protected vulnerable families in disaster-stricken Nepal.
This is not surprising. Mesa has prepared you to fulfill your role as a founder. All you need now is practice, and, if you look, you will find opportunities to do so all around you.
Because your work as citizens exists now, not in some distant future.
Our politics cries out for reform today, not tomorrow. Our institutions need a voice in our time, just as there has been one in others.
So as you leave here today headed to the wider world with its demands and concerns and presumptions, let the knowledge that human history is not in any way inevitable inform you; let your obligation to our republic inspire you; and let your capacity for leadership embolden you.
Your country needs you; indeed, the republic depends upon you.
Class of 2018, your business is with the present.
Congratulations, and good luck.
Adapted from remarks delivered at Colorado Mesa University on May 12, 2018.
