the world doesn’t revolve around you
Senator Barack Obama delivered the commencement address today at Southern New Hampshire University. He talked of three lessons he had learned about growing up, about becoming an adult and putting away childish things (1 Corinthians 13:11).
The latter two of the three lessons are typical fare for a commencement speech:
Challenge yourself. Take some risks in your life.
Persevere. Making your mark on the world is hard … It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way.
It was the first lesson Senator Obama cited that caught my attention and is not so standard fare — for commencement addresses or for political speeches:
The world doesn’t just revolve around you.
He continues:
There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit – the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room.
As you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier. There’s no community service requirement in the real world; no one forcing you to care. You’ll be free to live in neighborhoods with people who are exactly like yourself, and send your kids to the same schools, and narrow your concerns to what’s going in your own little circle.
Not only that – we live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. A culture where those in power too often encourage these selfish impulses.
They will tell you that the Americans who sleep in the streets and beg for food got there because they’re all lazy or weak of spirit. That the inner-city children who are trapped in dilapidated schools can’t learn and won’t learn and so we should just give up on them entirely. That the innocent people being slaughtered and expelled from their homes half a world away are somebody else’s problem to take care of.
I hope you don’t listen to this. I hope you choose to broaden, and not contract, your ambit of concern. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, although you do have that obligation. Not because you have a debt to all of those who helped you get to where you are, although you do have that debt.
It’s because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. And because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential – and become full-grown.
To read the rest of the speech, download the .pdf file: Remarks: Southern New Hampshire University Commencement.