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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