This position was originally delivered as a commencement speech at St. Lawrence University on May 22, 2011.
How I like the remainder of you could share my position as I bear on this point and looking out over what is a portrayal of the American dream.
The eager young faces of the graduates, representing a receive and rich variety that would not have been present in this setting not so long ago.
Parents and grandparents, siblings and friends looking on with pride - and in some cases, astonishment - that you've achieved this big goal. Nowhere else in the public are there as many of these ceremonies reflecting all of the many layers of our immigrant nation.
Savor the moment.
After all, you take a particular position in the story of this foundation and in the story of your country.
Your college years have steeled you for the unexpected turns of account and the consequences that we now bid you to assist us all go through.
In the preceding 4 years you have been witness to and in too many cases, felt the annoyance of, the most devastating economic recession since the Great Depression. Some of you may have parents who lost jobs or homes.
While you were here, preparing to direct your site in a company that values and rewards higher education, others your age were in consistent and in harm's way in the two longest wars in our history, wars that are not yet complete and every week bring painful news of deprivation of spirit or limbs to too many American families. We owe them more than a yellow ribbon on our cars or trucks, more than a telling of "God Bless America."
You have been witness to a startling turn in the Middle East with millions of people saying to their autocratic leaders, "Enough!" Enough economic corruption and political and physical oppression. We take our rights - and they have those demands by risking their lives.
You have seen the cruelties of natural disasters in the American South, Haiti and in Japan, a critically important ally deeply hurt by earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown.
You are going this sanctuary of erudition and pureness in a flavour of doubt and anxiety. Daily there are painful reminders that the economic model that has defined your lives was a house of cards.
Indeed, it is a slaughterhouse that will not be easily repaired, and yet then, it will make a far different form and evoke far different expectations.
We missed our way and allowed greed and overindulgence to get the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in use and dismissive of moderation. A friend, a really successful businessman who still lives a temperate life, says appropriately we get to replace want with need. It's not what we wish that should govern our lives but what we need. And, it goes without saying, what we can afford.
Something fundamental has happened and thither will be long term consequences when it comes to gamble and debt and economic assumptions. That does not think you will be consigned to a life of deprivation and struggle. America remains a state of unparalleled economic opportunities with a measure of life that evening in these constricted circumstances is good beyond the hope of hundreds of millions in less developed countries.
It is not a complete world well beyond the economical conditions, of course. Rogue nations with nuclear arms, or the voltage for getting them, show no signs of right behavior.
The critical signs ofyour mother - Mother Earth - have taken a work for the worse and the prescribed treatment is composite and controversial.
How we fuel our appetite for energy - for consumer, industrial and technological electrical power, for vehicular power - without exacerbating global climate exchange is an urgent question for your time.
In short, how we go on a smaller planet with many more people is a world that will prove your generation for the ease of your lives.
What more could a generation ask?
We may not have granted you a pure man but we have granted you dynamic opportunities for leaving a lasting legacy as a generation fearless and imaginative, tireless and selfless in pursuit of solutions to these monumental problems, a multiplication that emerged from this financial tsunami and re-built the landscape of their lives with an underpinning of sound values and an eye for proportion, knowing that in fact less can be more.
It leave not be gentle but I call you it will be rewarding in ways that a Wall Street bonus or a scene on American Idol cannot compete.
These are the tests that imprint generations for the long arc of history's judgment. Those who have an armoury of our time a 100 years from now or a m will not measure success or failure by the actions of President Obama alone. We're all on the scorecard, and we cannot escape that opinion by evasion or prevarication. Where to begin?
That is a determination you are better prepared to make. And it will be the most rewarding if it is frozen in a personal love and carried out with purpose even when the low steps are small.
You get an variety of quick and powerful tools that can help you - the net with its vast world of data and content for search and communication played out on ever smaller devices across an ever wider spectrum of choices.
But those are tools not oracles; they complement your head and your heart. They do not replace them.
You'll not solve global warming by striking the edit button; you'll not eliminate reckless avarice by hitting backspace; you can't put a hockey puck in a net by texting.
And do not deliver the heart of the human experience to 146 characters on a Twitter or a Facebook, however seductive the temptation.
You'll not get a Google alert when you come in love. You may be guidedby the unceasing effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to report that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so crucial to the human condition but all the seek engines in the world cannot vie with the first kiss.
It will do us little right to electrify the man if we short circuit our souls.
Remember, too, that somehow before BlackBerrys and iPhones, laptops and video games, great and welcome change was achieved.
In the life of many in this audience, there have been trials, tragedies and triumphs that go substantially beyond anything we're experiencing at the moment.
Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when every day life was about loss and sacrifice, when the economical conditions of the clock were so heavy and so unrelenting it would have been light enough for the American dream to melt away.
Instead, that generation found common cause first in their economic struggle and so in their visit to arms - World War II, the greatest single issue in the account of mankind.
They rose up and fought the two greatest military empires ever organized on six of the seven continents, in the skies and in all the seas.
At home women went to bring in shipyards and factories, in fields and and mines.
Farmers grew more and civilians ate less so the troops could take what they required to relieve the world - and they did precisely that.
When the war ended it would have been light enough for that generation to say, "I've done my share," to put down their arms, come home to house and community and interest only about their individual lives.
Instead, they went to college in record numbers, got married in record numbers, gave us new industries, science and art. They ran for office, from the village township to the White House, they rebuilt their enemies - and gave us the land we take today.
They did that without speed dial or email.
In so many ways, President Obama is a youngster of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who when he was only a few years old than you began a historic moral crusade again racial injustice armed with eloquence and passion, courage and conviction. He touched the state and liberated it, black and white, from the unconscionable burden of segregation.
Somehow he managed without a cell phone or laptop or web site.
In 1989 a lonely and even anonymous Chinese student stood unarmed in face of a Chinese tank and gave the public an imperishable image ofthe finding of China's young to convert their nation. He didn't text message the cooler or share a picture on YouTube.
He put his feet on the earth and his biography on the line.
In my travels in this land and abroad, to the inner cities and rural backwaters, to the worst neighborhoods in the most impoverished countries, to war zones and sites of natural disasters the most impressive people I see are not the mayors and governors, the warlords and prime ministers, the generals and ambassadors.
The mass I think are the idealistic young, the brave and gifted members of your age group who are the infantry soldiers in the long border to relieve human suffering. They put their boots on the land and their workforce in the dirt; they pass their nights in scary places and they are never more active than when they are doing this act not for wealth or personal glory but because it is the proper thing to do.
Those kinds of commitments need not have every day of your spirit but they will enrich it if you have a conscientious effort to give some of your time on this precious planet to helping your fellow men and women who are not as fortunate.
I get about other somewhat less weighty observations that may be helpful.
You've been told recently you're about to record the actual world. That's misleading. Your parents and I do not be the material world. Neither does this institution, for all of its obvious qualities.
The material man was junior high.
You'll be amazed by how often of the remainder of your lifetime will be consumed by the same petty jealousies you encountered in adolescence, the same irrational juvenile behavior, the cliques, the dumb jokes and hurt feelings.
Most of all, remember - you cannot get through this earth alone. You take each other - and we want you to observe one another in a common effort of restoring economic justice and genuine value, advancing racial and religious tolerance, creating a healthier planet.
We do that by hearing and reasoning not by yelling and fighting. Beware of ideological tyranny and uncompromising certainty. Do not become hostage to the orthodoxy of others.
This area was reinforced on big, bold ideas that served the common welfare. We're a democratic republic, not a compendium of fiefdoms changing the underlying rules of government with every election cycle.
No remarks of mine or parental advice will be adequate substitute for your own decision and loyalty to excellence. We're not your GPS system; at best, as commentators and parents, we're road signs. You must get your own way and I get little doubt you will.
On these occasions in the past I've said, "It's light to gain a buck; it's hard to attain difference." Then a parent suggested a re-wording: "It's hard to create a dollar but if you have a lot of bucks, you can produce a big difference." So for a sentence I offered both observations as a last word.
This class and these times required still another revision:
"It's a lot tougher to get a have a horse but making a dispute has its own rich reward."
Go away and earn a difference.
God knows, we want your help.
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