The World Is Waiting for You

Graduation Speeches to Live By from Activists, Writers, and Visionaries

Tara Grove, Isabel Ostrer

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781620970911
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Inspiring commencement speeches from Wynton Marsalis, Toni Morrison, Gloria Steinem, and others: "The perfect gift for grads-to-be" ( O, The Oprah Magazine ). "The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them, " acclaimed author and award-winning journalist Anna Quindlen cautioned graduates of Grinnell College. Jazz virtuoso and educator Wynton Marsalis advised new Connecticut College alums not to worry about being on time, but rather to be in time—because "time is actually your friend. He don't come back because he never goes away." And renowned physician and humanitarian Paul Farmer revealed at the University of Delaware his remarkable discovery—the new disease Empathy Deficit Disorder—and assured the commencers it could be cured. The prescient, fiery feminism of Gloria Steinem sits parallel to that of celebrated writer Ursula K.Le Guin, who asks, "What if I talked like a woman right here in public?" Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison sagaciously ponders how people centuries from now will perceive our current times, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Barbara Kingsolver asks those born into the Age of Irony to "imagine getting caught with your Optimism hanging out" and implores us always to act and speak the truth. With eighteen rousing graduation speeches, The World Is Waiting for You speaks to anyone who might take to heart the advice of Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards—"life as an activist, troublemaker, or agitator is a tremendous option and one I highly recommend"—and is the perfect gift for all who are ready to move their tassels to the left.

ON EMPATHY AND REASON

Paul Farmer

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE, 2013

I.

IT’S A PLEASURE TO be at “YoUDee” on the day you and your families mark the end of your studies here and take your next steps into lives as business folk, nurses, economists, physicists, applied mathematicians, physical therapists, teachers, psychologists, fellow anthropologists, et cetera. It’s a pleasure to be here as you begin your first days of freedom before resuming, as some of you will, studies in different and more specialized fields. And then of course some of you are not entirely sure what you’ll be doing or where you’ll be going. To be honest, it’s not that you aren’t “entirely sure” but rather that you have no clue. A lot of you are about to join, in the eyes of your parents and however briefly, the ranks of the unemployed. But it’s okay (and I say this to the parents): you’ve got that UD diploma.

If you’re worried or disgruntled, you can hardly blame me for the state of our economy. This plausible deniability is one of the advantages of being a commencement speaker who is not a high-ranking official or former titan of Wall Street. Yes, I know you wanted President Obama as your speaker, but he’s busy. Or Joe Biden, but he’s been here, done this. Or Oprah, but she’s doing the Harvard commencement. Or a rock star, but they don’t get up this early. So you get me, an infectious disease doctor and anthropologist who works mostly in far-off places and who is interested, primarily, in the health and well-being of the poorest and most vulnerable, some of them to be found right here in this country.

Many of you have guessed, already, that I will be talking about this very subject, hardly the usual fare in a graduation address. When you do enough of these speeches, especially about difficult topics, you look for inspiration where you can get it. Inspiration isn’t always in ready supply, and so every year at this time I get anxious about writing something new and memorable for a broad audience, a large fraction of which is hoping for the burdensome trifecta of brevity and entertainment and originality. (Granted, some care only about the brevity part, as I learned during a dinner supposedly in my honor and for Professor Hummel and President Zhu. A couple of high-ranking officials, who will go unnamed since they are in close proximity and could be packing heat under their robes, made a few too many brevity jokes.)

I know you wanted President Obama as your speaker, but he’s busy. Or a rock star, but they don’t get up this early.

But there’s no such thing as a stump speech for graduations, a challenge further complicated when the basic topic, if not the stories, is the same each year. Imagine for a minute what health equity might look like for an anthropologist who is also a doctor. Working in places like Haiti and Rwanda and Lesotho and Malawi, and also at a Harvard teaching hospital, reminds me of the social and cultural particularities of each time and place. But the sicknesses we see—AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, road trauma, cancer—vary less than you might think. The chest X-rays look the same, as do lab results; the physical examination of these patients is the same from one place to another. The stigmata of malnutrition are grimly similar wherever its cause is not having enough to eat. Even the aspirations of our patients—to feel better, to be cured, to be heard, to help friends and family members, to get back to work, or to return to school—all are often strikingly familiar from place to place. Too many of these aspirations are dashed not only by serious illness but also by poverty. Both need to be attacked.

And so I end up speaking, in every commencement address, about the need for you graduates, and for all of us, to be involved in efforts to make this world a better place. I recently published a book of these speeches and was interviewed two weeks ago by Charlie Rose, a thoughtful fellow with a television show. He liked the book, he said, but also made a rather annoying suggestion for my next commencement speech, which of course happens to be this one today. “Why don’t you just make it short and say the following: There’s too much unnecessary suffering in the world. Go out and fix it.”

He chuckled at his own joke. Quite a bit.

I squirmed, and offered Mr. Rose and his viewers a nervous reply: “Well, the students would cheer its brevity.” I opened my mouth for an erudite riposte, something about how Lincoln’s most famous speech came in at slightly less than 300 words, but Charlie had moved on.

Dear graduates, I’m afraid I can’t say much of anything in 300 words, which is why I write books and articles rather than tweet my thoughts. So don’t expect the Gettysburg Address. You have, as your speaker, neither a president nor a rock star. But I’d like to think you UD folks wouldn’t have me come all this way for concision alone. So here’s some good news: I will be making, today, an Important Announcement. “Dare to be first,” as the UD motto goes, and I’ve chosen this very day, your graduation, to announce my discovery and naming of a new disease, which I’ve elected to call EDD. That stands for Empathy Deficit Disorder. I’m also announcing today a cure for EDD, which I will lay out for you and for reporters wishing to cover this breaking news in nonclinical terms by telling a story about the struggle between empathy and reason. This narrative does in fact involve a rock star, and even a couple of presidents and other leaders, among whom EDD has, at times, reached epidemic proportions. Curing EDD among leaders, which many of you will become, will help untold millions whose unnecessary suffering may be averted or cured as long as our efforts are supported by a broad-based coalition of people able to link empathy to reason and action. That’s my diagnosis and here’s my prescription: we need to be part of that coalition. Since I’m the brilliant fellow who first discovered and announced, right here, the cure for Empathy Deficit Disorder, I’m hoping you will “dare to be first” in supporting me today.

Can unstable emotions like empathy and compassion be transformed into something more enduring? Yes.

II.

A few words first about empathy and reason prior to the story of my remarkable discovery of Empathy Deficit Disorder, a feat sure to be honored with great renown. In the May 20, 2013, edition of the New Yorker, Paul Bloom wrote a concise (if not exactly Lincolnesque) essay called “The Baby in the Well.” It’s a critique of our ready rush to empathy as the answer to all the world’s ills, including the ones we so often see in our work. The essay’s title refers to a story I remember well, as will your parents. In 1987, a baby named Jessica McClure fell into a well somewhere in Texas. Bloom goes on to mention similar well-recalled events, from another child who in 1949 fell into some other well, to those without happy endings, such as the 2005 disappearance of a teenager named Natalee Holloway while vacationing in Aruba. “Why,” he asks, “do people respond to these misfortunes and not to others?” Bloom—like many of you here, a student of psychology—reviews the works of his colleagues: “The psychologist Paul Slovic points out that, when Holloway disappeared, the story of her plight took up far more television time than the concurrent genocide in Darfur. Each day, more than 10 times the number of people who died in Hurricane Katrina die because of preventable diseases and more than 13 times as many perish from malnutrition.”

Empathy, Bloom concludes, “has some unfortunate features—it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate.” As to how the term is innumerate, he makes (for those of you not leaving UD with a degree in applied mathematics) the following point: “The number of victims hardly matters—there’s little psychological difference between hearing about the suffering of 5,000 and that of 500,000. Imagine reading that 2,000 people just died in an earthquake in a remote country, and then discovering that the actual number of deaths was 20,000. Do you now feel 10 times worse? To the extent that we recognize the numbers as significant, it’s because of reason, not empathy.” The essayist concludes as follows: “Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value of the lives of those we love.”

I went back and read the essay again yesterday, since I so often rely on empathy and work in such “remote” countries, including one not so remote from Delaware in which a recent earthquake took more than 200,000 lives. Bloom’s tone may be grumpy—and I’m not saying that because he’s a professor at Yale—but I get his point: empathy is not only innumerate but also an “unstable emotion,” like pity or mercy or compassion. But can unstable emotions like empathy and compassion be transformed into something more enduring? Can a spark of empathy once ignited—however briefly, however tenuously—lead to reasoned decisions and to compassionate policies that might transform our world, including the precincts in which we live, into one in which there are fewer tragedies or less brutal echoes of them?

I think the answer to these questions is an emphatic Yes. To make my case, I offer you an improbable story of collective Empathy Deficit Disorder and of some of the steps taken to cure it. The story will take us back over three decades, and from the United States to Rwanda, where Partners In Health has worked for the better part of a decade.

Perhaps the story was improbable to me because I didn’t know much of it until one week ago, when I read a new book by, of all people, Elton John. He’s the promised rock star in this story. I knew that John had founded an important foundation, since it has supported Partners In Health’s work in rural Haiti. But, to be honest, I didn’t know how deeply and for how long he had been involved in reaching out directly to AIDS patients living in poverty in places like Atlanta, Georgia, or New York City, until I read his new book, Love Is the Cure, nor did I fully understand his foundation’s work in places including Haiti, South Africa, and the Ukraine, to name just a few. My only excuse for not appreciating fully Elton John’s engagement is a pretty lame one: between my father and my children, between “Crocodile Rock” and The Lion King, I’d experienced an excessive battering with his songs for much of my childhood and most of my adult years.

This story is about Mr. John’s empathy and what he did to transform empathy into action and reason. It’s about EDD and its diagnosis, often easy, and its cure, which is harder. Here’s part of the story as he tells it. In 1985, the British rock star was thumbing through a magazine and read about an American boy born with hemophilia. The boy, who hailed from a small town in the Midwest, was in and out of the hospital throughout his childhood. Like so many afflicted with this disorder but with access to care, he relied on infusions of a clotting factor to stop a painful, potentially lethal, hemorrhage. As some of you will recall, U.S. supplies of Factor VIII, harvested from donated blood, were suddenly and widely contaminated with HIV, the virus that in 1984 was discovered to cause AIDS, which had been first described only three years previously. A huge fraction of hemophiliacs who relied on such treatments were subsequently discovered to be sick or infected.

This boy was one of them. His name was Ryan White. He was given six months to live. The year was 1984. The town was Kokomo, Indiana. Although Ryan’s mother, who worked at the local General Motors plant, shared this hard news with her teenaged son, it was not Jeanne White’s plan, in those first years of a frightening new epidemic, to broadcast the news widely. But a local paper ran a story disclosing her son’s diagnosis. Soon the whole town knew. As if Ryan, sick with both hemophilia and AIDS, didn’t have enough problems, he was soon shunned and mocked by his peers; his locker at school, vandalized. The grownups were even worse. After one grueling hospitalization, Ryan was prevented from returning to school, although the medical community was pretty confident, even then, that the disease could not be spread through casual contact. Even at his church, no one would shake Ryan’s outstretched hand during the Rite of Peace. His mother and sister were also treated as pariahs. They were all threatened and worse. This was, of course, a stunning lack of both empathy and reason. It’s a classic case, retrospectively diagnosed, of collective Empathy Deficit Disorder.

Ryan and his mother decided to sue the school, not so much to cure EDD as to return Ryan to his classroom. A local judge dismissed the Whites’ lawsuit, instructing their lawyers that, if they had a gripe with the school superintendent’s decision, they were welcome to take it up with the Indiana Department of Education. During his appeal, Ryan could only listen in to his classes, calling in each day from home.

Elton John describes what happened next.

The appeals process that ensued was long, nasty and public, with Ryan, now 14 years old, at the center of it all. The local school board and many parents of Ryan’s schoolmates were vehemently opposed to him attending school. More than a hundred parents threatened to file a lawsuit if Ryan was allowed to return. In late November, the Indiana Department of Education ruled in Ryan’s favor and ordered the school to open its doors to him, except then he was very sick. The local school board appealed, prolonging Ryan’s absence from the classroom. Months later, a state board again ruled that Ryan should be allowed to attend school with the approval of a county health official.

With more than half the school year gone, Ryan was officially cleared to return to classes on February 21, 1986. The thrill of victory, though, was short-lived. On his first day back, he was pulled from the classroom and brought to court. A group of parents had filed an injunction to block his return, and the judge issued a restraining order against him. When the judge handed down his verdict, the room packed with parents began to cheer, while Ryan and Jeanne looked on, shocked and scared.*

At this point, even the least accomplished diagnostician wil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Learn Not to Listen
• Be In Time
• How to Be Hopeful
• To All My Children
• Who Will Defend the Earth?
• The Pursuit of Meaningfulness
• Go the Distance
• The World Is Waiting for You
• Allow Hope but Also Fear
• On Empathy and Reason
• Not for Profit
• Know Your History
• The Earth Is Hiring
• Make This World a Better Place
• Against Discouragement
• Listen to Your Mother
• Don’t Wait to Change the World
• A Left-Handed Commencement Address
• Contributors
• Permissions
• About the Editors