Bill Clinton’s Commencement Speech at Harvard – June 6, 2007

The former President explained much societal dysfunction when he asked a simple question:  Should we focus on what human beings have in common or should we obsess about their minor differences? 

The outcome of this simple choice determines innumerable personal and political agendas.  To the extent that we choose incorrectly, the resulting contentious rhetoric has the capacity to mushroom into oppression and violence that can displace, maim and kill millions of people.  It has done so repeatedly.

Many of our political and moral disputes stem from this basic low-level perceptual choice: whether to focus on differences or commonalities.  Here is how Clinton captured the issue:

So if you look around this vast crowd today, at the military caps and the baseball caps and the cowboy hats and the turbans, if you look at all the different colors of skin, all the heights, all the widths, all the everything, it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our genetic make-up. Don’t you think it’s interesting that not just people you find appalling, but all the rest of us, spend 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of one percent?

For at least six years, the air has been thick with violence, bigotry and oppression  because too many people are making the wrong choice up front.  The current Administration excels at choosing badly. The result? A de facto national policy that anyone who is different is suspicious. 

As eloquently …