Clinton wows crowd

FORMER PRESIDENT BILL Clinton speaks to the Middlebury College graduating class and a crowd of more than 7,000 at Sunday’s commencement ceremony.

Independent photo/Trent Campbell

May 31, 2007

By MEGAN JAMES

MIDDLEBURY — Bill Clinton spoke slowly and took deep breaths during his address at Middlebury College on Sunday. He didn’t have a script and his message was achingly simple: genetically, he said, all human beings are 99.9 percent the same.

That similarity provides the opportunity to see all the world’s people as one community.

More than 7,000 people secured tickets to the college’s graduation ceremony, and many of them stayed just long enough to hear the former president’s remarks.

It was raining when Clinton joined faculty, administration and trustees processing through the more than 600 graduates in the class of 2007. Graduates in blue plastic ponchos they had zipped into their robes reached out to shake Clinton’s hand as he passed, a single Secret Service agent preceding him.

On the stage, Clinton leaned over and whispered to Rick Fritz, chairman of the college board of trustees, about the dignitaries receiving honorary degrees, who ranged from Vermont Symphony Orchestra Chorus director Robert De Cormier to entrepreneur Janet Tiebout Hanson.

“I said to him, as I was listening to the other people who were getting honorary degrees, ‘I wish one of them were speaking, maybe all of them. I could learn more,’” Clinton said at the opening of his speech.

He also complimented student speaker Vani Sathisan, who encouraged her fellow graduates to “love what you do, get good at it, and let the chips fall where they may.”

Clinton has strong connections to Middlebury and Vermont. Middlebury graduate Andrew Friendly served in the White House as the president’s personal aide; former Vermont Gov. Madeleine Kunin served as ambassador to Switzerland during his administration; and Middlebury trustee and Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld asked Clinton to speak at his son’s graduation. 

But Clinton’s most intimate knowledge of Middlebury came from Ron Brown, his Secretary of Commerce and a Middlebury graduate, who was killed in a plane crash in 1996 while leading an American delegation to the Balkans.

 “He was an unbelievable human being and like a brother to me,” Clinton said. “His eyes would just light up every time he talked about Middlebury. And I hope that all of you for the rest of your lives, however long that might be, will feel some of that.”

What Brown found at Middlebury, Clinton said, was community. He became the first African American member of his fraternity there, and when the group had to decide whether to kick him out or be kicked out of the national fraternity themselves, they chose to keep him.

Clinton urged his listeners to build community with “the elemental knowledge that what we have in common is more important than what divides us.”

The most astounding fact revealed in the Human Genome Project in 2000, he said, was not the genetic markers for diabetes, Alzheimer’s, breast cancer and Parkinson’s — though these are important discoveries — but that the genetic makeup of all human beings is 99.9 percent identical. 

“Now that is astonishing,” he said. “I mean look at each other. Every difference you can see of gender, skin color, hair color, eye color, height, weight, you name it. Anything you can possibly observe about each other that seems different is rooted in a tenth of one percent of your genetic makeup. And yet most of us spend 90 percent of our time focused on the one tenth of one percent.”

The crowd was silent as Clinton spoke. The rain had let up, and the sun was coming out, but no one rustled a blue plastic poncho.

Clinton has collaborated with South Africa’s former president Nelson Mandela to start a youth service project for black and white children in that country. He explained that the project adopted the Xhosa word “ubuntu” as a motto, a word he hopes all people can understand.

“It simply means in English, ‘I am because you are,’” Clinton said. “Our differences cannot be as important as our common humanity because we couldn’t even exist in any meaningful sense without each other.”

And in that country’s central highlands, he explained, when two people meet each other along a path “and one person says, ‘Hello, how are you, good morning,’ the answer is not, ‘I’m fine, how are you?’ The answer, in English, is ‘I see you.’”

Then Clinton addressed the graduates directly.

“You are probably as free of artificial, categorical bigotry as any group of young people has ever been,” he said. “But you have gifts: the gift of a fine mind, the gift of the chance to be here, the gift of all the choices you have when you leave. So the bigotry you will have to work hard to avoid is not seeing everyone else.

“When we leave here today, someone is going to have to fold up all of these chairs and clean this place up,” he said. “A lot of people who do that work think no one ever sees them. They have to be involved in the fight against climate change too, or the fight against income inequality. They have to have chances in life.”

Nearly 100 facilities services staff members had arrived between 4 and 5 a.m. on Sunday to make a final sweep of the college grounds for trash before setting up the thousands of folding chairs. They had planted temporary gardens, pounded in white marker poles and managed the crowd.

And when Clinton finished his speech, when each graduate’s name had been called to receive a diploma and they had all tossed their caps in the air, those same workers returned to pack everything away.

“As you save the world, remember all the people in it,” Clinton said. “If you see everyone, if you believe that we are because others are, if you serve in that spirit, your grandchildren will be here 50 years from now and it will be even better because you will have fulfilled humanity’s first obligation: to honor what is holy about us and to pass it on.”

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