UF00083774_00001.pdf

UF00083774_00001.txt

UF00083774_00001_pdf.txt

ADDRESS TO THE BRTRAH SCHOOL 6/7/58

I know it is customary. and perhaps expected. for commence-
ment speakers to apologize for their part in the graduation
exercises, but I am not troubled by the impulse to do so. There
is a sameness to these occasions -- to the casual observer this
may be a repeat performance -- but it is the sameness or the
sunrise, which occurs with total regularity, but is always
fresh and different, and beautiful.

Perhaps in the long sweep of time history does repeat itself.
but in the short span of your lives it hasn't occurred. and it
won't. Ive never known two sunrises alike. nor two graduations,
not two lives.

Last Sunday I heard a marvelous commencement speech. full
of wit and wisdom, and was tempted to steal it for you today.
Our this is not last Sunday. and the world has changed:

A young nan who aspired to leadershi has died. His death

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issvery Americ s loss.A Campaigning for President wil never
again be the same. One man, by his act of violence. has erected
a barrier between the American public and those who seek their
political support. and that barrier is not compatible with
Democracy.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. the historian, places the guilt

for this deed on every American. He conceives that we. as a nation.

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live under some primal curse that springs from our dark past.

Spokesmen for the Arab world place the blame on the
American nation as accessorys to the murder of their
Palestinian homeland.

James Reston senses'eomething in the air...a kind of
moral delinquency.

A television commentator pointed out that there were
5.000-plus deaths from firearms in America last year, only
30 or 40 in England and France.

The Jacksonville Journal commented that Robert Kennedy's
death was a harvest of hate, that our souls are overdue for
a thorough cleansing.

It does not seem a very promising time in which to
graduate. Colleges are full of discontent. Professors are
counselling rebellion. Police are using force on campuses
where reason should prevail.

I would suggest to you, though. that the wrong goat is
being driven into the wilderness. I do not believe this is a
basically evil nation, nor a cursed one. I do not believe we
are stamped by society with a birthright of violence. The
murder of John Kennedy by a warped American schooled in Russia
and Cuba, and Robert Kennedy by an Arab permitted by a generous
America to live here though not a citizen. and Martin Luther King

by an unknown assailant influenced by we know not what forces, does

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not support em: argument for damning a nation. This is a wonder-
ful.exciting time to graduate.

The turmoil in the nation results from our attempt to
expand both the concept of freedom and the ideal of justice.

Freedom cannot be expanded to a point wheltit becomes
license without destroying itself.

When the concept of freedom is expanded to include the
right to violate the social compact which is the fabric of
freedom. it destroys that fabric -- and freedom.

when the exercise of freedom ignores both self-restraint and
social restraint it is not freedom, but anarchy.

And when society. in its pursuit of freedom condones its

violation, it cannot long remain free.

But thank God you live in a land where the problem is not

too little freedom, but too much. v34 -' X M "h

Justice, too. has its trib1r!lys. Freedom and justice
llti o Irns,

are not entirely compatible. because to be free is to have
the right to be wrong: to be just. theltcan be no wrong.

To some extent the rebellion in our cities is a demand
in the name of justice for economic equality to match our
political equality. But the two cannot co-sxist. 3 5*? 0
To \A ,

we A ricans have a vest responsibility for the first

time in history we stand in liberty within sight of plenty.

Our sin. if it be that, is that we have let our reach exceed




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