A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Good morning. Father Leahy, Your Eminence Cardinal Law, the four distinguished honorees, members of the Board of Trustees, members of the faculty and administrative staff, ladies and gentlemen.

On this important day of achievement, I begin by extending my best wishes to the Class of 2000. You are the first class in the new century, and you are graduating from a first-class university. I sincerely hope that all of you are setting out on the high road of achievement, success and service to others.

I take special pleasure in acknowledging the many graduates of the Lynch School of Education. I knew some of you were out there in the crowd. I can think of no better way to serve this great country of ours than to take up the challenge of becoming a teacher or educator. Boston College has a long history of supporting education, and several of the top educators in New England, including David Driscoll, the Massachusetts commissioner of education, are graduates of this fine institution.

I have had the good fortune to know many Boston College graduates, and one of your best is my Deputy Assistant Secretary for Higher Education, Maureen McLaughlin, who is here with me today. Maureen comes from a small Irish American family of 11 children.

All 10 of Maureen's sisters and brothers attended Boston College, and with good reason. Doctor Francis McLaughlin, Maureen's father, has been a faculty member in your Department of Economics for almost 40 years. I suspect that some of the graduates here today have had to face the intellectual challenge of his course.

In my brief remarks, today, I take as my theme this simple statement-that your time is your life. Your time is your life.

So I want you to stop and think with me for a moment about time-time leading up to your entry into college, your time here at Boston College, and then your time after you leave this great institution with your diploma in hand.

For 18 years or more, your parents worried about you directly. Your parents stood at your side, gave you courage, and more than once probably grounded you to shape your character. But in the end their success was your success, and you went off to college. Now four years or five years later, you have accomplished what you set out to achieve.

So on this day of celebration I urge you to recognize the deep pride that your parents and other family members and friends feel for you. Please thank your parents for their support and encouragement in helping you reach this day. And thank them for their time and their strong arms.

And please, if only for a moment, remember how your experience at B.C. has changed you. You have changed, haven't you? When you came to B.C. you became part of a university community, but more importantly you became the master of your own time.

You were given the freedom to spend your own time stretching your mind and lifting your horizons. And on more than one occasion, you probably lost all sense of time when you stayed up late at night to ask the questions about life that needed answering or desperately sought to finish a term paper.

But I am sure you also did something more. You formed friendships that will last a lifetime. At this very moment, many of you are sitting with friends who will be best friends forever. Look around you.

Many of you also took the time to think through your moral and spiritual development, and came to appreciate the Jesuit tradition of service to others, working for and with those on the margin of our society-the poor, immigrants and all those fellow humans who are struggling. I ask you to continue to find time in your busy lives ahead to pursue this fight for social justice.

Your other challenge is to find the time to slow down your lives. This may seem a bit of odd advice as you are charging out the door with your diploma in hand, full of excitement and exuberance. But wait and listen. I may be on to something.

We live in a modern society that values time beyond anything else. We want our packages to arrive overnight. We want faster search engines for our computers. We even want people to talk faster on our answering machines so we can get on to the next message. We hail as a major breakthrough every new discovery that allows us to save time.

But I worry that in all this rush to stay ahead and get ahead-in all this rush to achieve what we want to achieve-we may be losing our way. I worry that we are missing something that is far deeper than time. In the process of all this rushing we may be losing our connections to our friends, our sense of family and, at times, our own sense of humanity.

Indeed, we are letting our children grow up, at times, almost alone, and disconnected. The education of our children, their moral development and sense of who they are is done in fits and starts.

The way our major institutions-from schools to businesses-carve out time for the American family is, in my opinion, both unhealthy and unwise. We ask parents and families to twist and turn in every possible way to fit the time needs of our institutions and modern life instead of the other way around.

My point here is really quite simple. As you shape your new lives- take time out to reflect on what is truly important-the answer may surprise you. You may discover that time with good friends, your new baby, or your aging parents-may be far more valuable to you than everything modern and up-to-date.

And please remember that the "time" we give to others is one of the most important gifts we can give. The time we set aside to listen, to care, to lift someone up, or even help them heal, is very important.

I also ask you to use your time in another way as well. One of the great debates in modern America is how to resolve the tension between the freedom of the individual and the needs of the community. This is not a new debate. Indeed, this tension has been with us, as Americans, for a very long time.

In one camp are those who believe that they should have the absolute freedom as individuals to achieve economic success, yet at the same time they have a strong desire to restrict the social freedom of others. In the other camp, are those who believe that economic freedom must be restricted at times for the good of all, yet at the same time they want to have as much social freedom as possible. This is the American dilemma.

Now we are in new circumstances. The explosive growth of the Internet and individual freedom associated with its use is possibly the best example. Indeed, the values of some who are developing the Internet-that individuals should use their talent and creativity for the good of all and share their discoveries and success with others at no cost-is possibly the most powerful example of democracy and equality in our time.

So your challenge, as the millennium generation, is to move beyond the current either/or debate, which is becoming increasingly stale, and find a new synthesis for the 21st century-synthesis that finds a balance between individual freedom and community responsibility.

My final thought is that we, as Americans, have, in this time of peace and prosperity, the luxury to imagine a new future for our country and indeed for humanity as a whole: A future that is less about borders and more about learning together; a future that is less about ethnicity and more about the excellence of your mind; and a future that is less about intolerance and more about inclusiveness.

Please remember that the freedom to learn, the freedom of religion, the freedom to live in a civil society, even the freedom to be respected as an individual are basic human rights that are still in question in so many parts of the world.

Those of us who have the luxury of time and, indeed, the luxury of freedom, have the serious obligation to speak up for those who have neither.

So I encourage you to use your time, in this new period of your lives, to speak up for the voiceless, to speak up for freedom and to speak up for and stand with those who are seeking to overcome social injustice.

I end now and I end with a quote from a dear old friend from my home state of South Carolina. When he grew up he became Joseph Cardinal Bernadin of Chicago. He was a modern American and also a most faithful servant to his church. He was known as a reconciler and consensus-builder.

This is what he said and this is what I have so often repeated on his behalf: " It is wrong to waste the precious gift of time given to us on acrimony and division." Listen again, "It is wrong to waste the precious gift of time given to us on acrimony and division."

So I encourage you, Class of 2000, in this new century and in this new era to use your time wisely. Your time is your life. Please use your time to overcome acrimony and division. Please use your time in service to others. And please use your time to find happiness and joy in your new lives.

I congratulate you the Class of 2000, and I thank you for your time.