Ambassador Speeches

Remarks by U.S. Ambassador Robert J. Callahan at Lincoln International Academy Graduation Ceremony

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Buenas noches. Antes de iniciar mi discurso en inglés, me gustaría darles la bienvenida en español a los amigos y familiares de los graduandos. Aunque estoy seguro que muchos de ustedes entienden inglés, quizás también existen algunos miembros de la audiencia que no lo comprenden. Después de todo, estamos en Nicaragua. Entonces, para ustedes, yo quiero darles una bienvenida especial y pedirles su indulgencia mientras les hablo a los graduandos, todos los cuales son bilingües, en la lengua de su educación. Muchas gracias.

Honored graduates, teachers, administrators, and board members of Lincoln International Academy; family and friends of the graduates; ladies and gentlemen:

Thank you for inviting me to address the 44 graduates of the class of 2009.  They are a special group indeed.  They represent 10 countries, will attend universities in Nicaragua, Honduras, Canada, and the United States, and have earned scholarships valued at over 3.1 million dollars. Eleven of them, or fully one-quarter, have been at Lincoln since kindergarten and will receive seniority awards.  And in perhaps the most telling statistic about this group’s values and commitment, they have donated almost 7,500 hours to community service during their years at Lincoln Academy.

I think that all of them have earned a round of applause.

Of course, they would not have had those many successes without the help of a dedicated faculty and administrative staff, a determined board of directors, and, most important, devoted parents, supportive relatives, and loyal friends.

I think that they too merit our applause.

Together, the board, administrators, teachers, students – in a phrase, the Lincoln Academy community – have much to be proud of, not least the recent announcement by the prestigious Southern Association of Colleges and Schools that it has given Lincoln full accreditation.

Give yourselves, all of you, a big hand.

Occasions such as commencement exercises normally call for advice and counsel.  I have always thought that only the good and wise should offer such things.  And since I am neither particularly wise nor notably good, I have decided to rely on a few people who have or had both those qualities and to borrow generously from them this afternoon.
Robert Fulghum is an American essayist who wrote a book that spent two years on the New York Times best-seller list in the late 1980s and was translated into over a dozen languages.  It was called, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”

He wrote that early on in life he learned he should:

Share everything;

Play fair;

Never hit anyone;

Clean up his own mess;

Say he was sorry when he hurt someone;

Live a balanced life and learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some;

When out in the big world to watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together; and,

Take a nap.

That’s pretty good advice, both simple and wise, especially the last piece.  At every opportunity, I take a nap, sometimes even at work.  When you get to college, I’d urge you to do the same, but not in class.  Naps are good for the mind, soul, and body.

I suspect that most of us know that, and we also know that his other advice, which in truth is more important, is also good and wise.  After all, who wouldn’t think that sharing and playing fair and treating people kindly are good ideas?  Who would object to tidying up his or her own mess or apologizing for hurting someone with our words or actions?  Who doesn’t feel more secure when holding hands and sticking with friends?

These things we all know, we all have learned, at home, on the playground, in kindergarten.

The problem, it seems to me, comes in trying to apply what we know to what we do.  In other words, translate thought into action, live our values.  If you are like most mortals, you have come up short on occasion.  If you are anything like me, then you fail more often than you succeed in your attempt to match your deeds to your principles.

You don’t always play fair or clean up your own mess.  You have hurt people with words.  You can be selfish and stingy and self-centered, you can be grouchy and crabby and gloomy.

It’s kind of depressing if you think about it.  So, what should we do?  Maybe we should just ignore it, not think about it at all.  I’ve done that and it works for a while, but then it starts to gnaw at me and I can’t sleep and that makes me crabbier and the entire cycle starts anew.

So, perhaps we ought to think more about it, in a different way.  Like you, I am the product of Catholic schools.  In fact, I spent every moment of my formal education, from kindergarten at St. Barbara’s through graduate studies at DePaul University, at Catholic schools, 19 years in all.  If there wasn’t a crucifix on the wall, I was not in class.

My training in Catholicism began with catechism, advanced through religion classes in primary school, and finally ended in the study of theology in my Dominican high school and Jesuit university.  Those courses were tough, every bit as hard as physics or calculus, as we attempted to understand Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas.  And despite all those courses and all those hours trying to make sense of the City of God and the Summa Theologica, I know that I missed a lot of the meaning.

But I did come away with an idea of the Catholic doctrine of original sin, at least my interpretation of it.  I came to understand that, in its broadest sense, original sin means that we are weak, that we are susceptible to temptations of every sort, prone to uncharitable thoughts and unkind deeds.  This, I concluded counter-intuitively, was a hopeful and positive message.

Why?  Well, it says that we, every one of us, are all this way and that life is a struggle to do the right thing.  In combination with a belief in redemption, it means that we need to keep trying and, when we fail, we need to try again.  I guess I have come to think that we won’t be judged so much on our failures as on how we tried to overcome them.

I hope there are no moral theologians present.  They may have serious concerns about my views on some complex theological arguments.  And they have studied these things and know what they’re talking about.  I studied history and practice diplomacy. 

Still, it gets me back to my point about the tension between knowing what to do and actually doing it.  We are not going to succeed every day and all the time.  We are going to fail and fail often. 

Life is like that.  We will fall down and when we stagger to our feet, we’ll trip again.  But, although we might get discouraged, we can’t give up. 

This school is named for Abraham Lincoln.  I hope you have had the opportunity to learn something about this extraordinary man.  If you have, you know that he was awkward in appearance and subject to long bouts of melancholy.  He had just a few years of formal education and won exactly one election before his victorious run for president.

Lincoln could have remained a small-town lawyer in Illinois and not persisted in his political ambitions.  He didn’t have to keep picking himself up, summoning his courage, and trying again.  But had he done that, had he simply accepted his failures and his station in life, imagine how different America would be today.

Lincoln, to my mind, took the most difficult and courageous decision in American history:  he went to war to preserve the union, even though it would have been easier to let the South go its own way.  Then, during that war, he decreed an end to the curse of slavery, elevating what had been a battle for national survival to a crusade for freedom.  In the process, he changed history for the better.

Now Lincoln was not a religious man, although he believed in God and often invoked his blessings and guidance.  But he did seem to understand at some level the doctrine of original sin, the belief that all of us are weak and fallible and prone to occasional failure.  And he probably also understood that we learned the important things early in life.
In his Second Inaugural Address, delivered just a month before he was killed by an assassin shortly after the war had come to an end, and certainly among the very best of American speeches, he said the following in the concluding paragraph:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Remember what Robert Fulghum said about sharing, playing fair, forgiving, holding hands and sticking together?  Isn’t that what Lincoln is asking as a horrible and bloody war draws to a close?  Isn’t he urging us to accept our responsibilities, reconcile with our enemies, and think of others?

It is indeed rare for anyone to be called upon to respond to a crisis of the kind Lincoln faced.   Perhaps a dozen or so in history have had to rise to such an occasion.   It is almost inconceivable that any of us will ever be put to such an excruciating test.

Yet, on a far more modest scale, we do confront challenges every day, and they get tougher as we grow older.  Most of you will be away at school in a few months, away from family and on your own.  You will own your own time, have more personal freedom than you ever thought possible.  Instead of spending from early morning to mid-afternoon in school, about 40 hours a week, you will be in class only 15 or 18 hours a week.  You’ll have no mother around to badger you about doing your homework, no father to answer to about a paper or test.  You will be on your own.

And guess what?  You probably won’t use all that free time to good purpose.  You may not get an “A” on every exam.  You may wait until the last moment to start that research paper and then rush through it, producing an inferior product.  You may brush off an appeal for help from someone in your course or say something hurtful in a moment of anger or passion.  I have certainly been guilty of all that, and much more, and I know I could have done better, in school, on the baseball diamond, in life.

I continue to worry a lot about it, fret over my bad habits and lack of discipline.  I have, however, come to appreciate that I will have another chance – maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe next year -- and the next time around, I tell myself, I will do better. 

Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no.  But the important thing is to stay positive, keep at it, try to improve, no matter how long it takes.  It’s a process.  But I continue to believe that over time, slowly and subconsciously, it begins to take hold.  

That was Fulghum’s point.  We learn very young what we should do, for ourselves and to others.  Then, for the rest of our lives, we attempt to meet those ideals, to live by them.  And it gets a bit less difficult each time we do it, although it never becomes easy.

Maybe that’s another way of understanding original sin. Because we are weak and easily tempted, it is never easy to live up to our ideals, but it is possible to get closer to them through practice and discipline. 

Lincoln said much the same thing in his Second Inaugural Address.  After describing the horrors of slavery and the terrible toll of war, he promised “malice toward none” and “charity for all.”

Sometime in the next four years, in a philosophy or perhaps a theology class, you are likely to come across the works of Immanuel Kant, a Prussian philosopher who lived toward the end of the Enlightenment, about the time of the American Revolution.  His works are dense and difficult to understand and I am glad he’s in my past.  But he is famous for something that he called the “categorical imperative.” 

Entire courses are given over to the study of this concept, but in a really oversimplified way it means that there is an absolute and unconditional moral law, and that all our duties and obligations derive from this law, and that the law says that we must do the right thing always and in all circumstances.

The homespun wisdom of Robert Fulghum.  The doctrine of original sin.  The words and example of Abraham Lincoln.  The moral philosophy of a long-dead Prussian thinker.
And all of them tell us the same thing: do the right thing – the things we learned in kindergarten -- and don’t give up.  

So. Let’s remember to share and clean up our own messes; to play fair and hold hands; to stick together and to say we’re sorry.  That’s pretty good advice, supported by some wise and perceptive people, and tested over a long period of time. 

And, as we attempt to do the right thing, let’s remember that there is no shame in failing, only in failing to try. 

Congratulations again, to our graduates and to those who nurtured, taught, and encouraged them, and good luck as you move on to the next stage of your life.
Oh, and one last thing:  remember to take a nap, but never in class.

Thank you.