Entering the Unpredictable: Making the Road by Walking

Thanks to President Shinn, the trustees, and faculty who invited me to give the commencement address to you graduates. I am deeply honored to be receiving an honorary degree from Berea. I have wished I could have been a student at Berea. Receiving a Berea honorary degree should mean that I am an honorary Berea student. So, congratulations to my classmate graduates and their families who make this commencement possible.

I have been worried about what to say to graduates today. Should I say we are all spinning around on a fragile planet with numerous environmental disasters and a country in an economic crisis and massive unemployment? Should I apologize for the mess our generation is leaving for you to deal with? I asked a young friend who recently graduated from college what I should say to new graduates. She is now scraping together several jobs including rafting guide, waitress in a restaurant on the river and a temp with the Forest Service.

She said: Tell them to buy a goat and make goat cheese. I like goat cheese, but I don't think that is the hope you are looking for.

You and your family have hopes for your future, and I want to take this privileged position as your commencement speaker to tell you some hopes I have for you. I have titled my remarks: "Entering the Unpredictable: Making the Road by Walking." I plan to tell you how you can change the world by walking the road not taken.

You are probably familiar with the Robert Frost poem: "The Road Not Taken." I use his road not taken as the way you can change the world. And I add the line from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, "you make the road by walking."

You are now graduating from an outstanding liberal arts college. As you begin hunting for a job, you may wonder how your liberal education will help.

For the past few years you have been in a safe, predictable environment in which you have learned how to learn. This is probably your most important gift. Now you must learn new ways to navigate in the unpredictable. Your knowledge from many subjects and your work experiences give you the ability to be creative, the ability to see things whole, to connect the dots, and not get stuck on the wrong path. Your education gives you the ability to navigate the road not taken.

We, the older generations, tell you that we are leaving you with many problems. But we hope that you have the energy and courage to deal with these problems, which we have caused because of the road we have been walking. We urge you to find a new road.

You are in a very different world than the one I entered when I graduated from college. It was in 1946, over sixty years ago, at Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, Georgia. It was an optimistic time. We had just ended World War ii, and we believed it was the war to end all wars. I gave talks at Kiwanis clubs about hopes for global peace. But since then there has been the Korean War, Vietnam, and Middle East War, and now we are involved in two wars and numerous tribal or civil wars or terrorist activities and various skirmishes all over the world. We have become a military empire with 700 military bases in 130 countries. How can we change our road? What gps can we use to lead us to global peace?

We also had great trust in our industrial power. We believed in progress, economic growth, and our ability to control the environment. We ignored the ecological damage of economic-growth. We did not understand the interconnection and interdependence between humans and habitat and became willing exploiters of the world's resources for progress. Today we realize that the industrial, economic-growth economy based on fossil fuel energy was destructive, and the road we have been traveling is now a road to nowhere. Incredible problems resulted from the road we took, the policies, the...