Alan Keyes
May 6, 2000

Thank you very much. Well, greetings to the class of 2000.

Now, I hate to begin my talk by seeming contrary, but I always get slightly uncomfortable when folks talk about the year 2000 as the beginning of the new millennium. It's almost as if we live--we do live in the Clinton era, we all know that, and as a result, everything that we do has to be false. And therefore, among other things, we decided we'd make a false start to the new millennium. This is the 20th century. We do know that, right? Now, it wouldn't be the 20th century, I've got news for you, if the year two thousand wasn't included in it. So, for all the lies that you may have been told, you are not the first class of the new millennium; you are the last class of the old one. And that bears thinking on. It bears thinking on, because, as we look forward into the darkness, some of us like to forget to look back and to think about where we've been, what we have come from.

We're all full of thoughts of what is to be, and it seems always so appropriate at graduation time just to think about the future. But the truth is that, as someone once remarked, I think quite wisely, the odd thing about tomorrow is it never quite gets here--because, once it gets here, it's today. The opportunities, such as they are, are a product of what we do now and of what we have to look back upon. And, at some point in your lives, I think you will pass a certain line. Probably most of you as graduates today have not. Some of you may, though, and it's that line in life where you feel the weight of your past a little bit more than you feel the lure of your future. It's an honest moment. But, it's also a moment in which, if you take it seriously, you may cut through some of the lies that are sold to you as truth today. And, in the next ten or fifteen minutes, that's what I'd like to try to help you do. Because I think it's going be more useful than standing here in the usual fashion and telling you to "go forward with high heart into the success that's inevitable, given your wonderful education," and so forth and so on.

You have a wonderful education, so do many people in this life. You work hard. You prepare yourself. You go out. You do your absolute best. And, then you will reach a point in life, regardless of whatever else goes on, where most people, most of the time, have to acknowledge that all of the wonderful dreams that fill your mind today didn't quite come true. The books were not written. The films were not all made. The loves were not all enjoyed. And, somewhere along the way, you have to deal with things you already have begun to know--the hard hours and the tough losses; the things that don't work out; and the people who were here yesterday but are gone now, whose love was a certainty that failed, whose hope for you was expressed in ways that you did not understand until it was too late.

And so, I want to speak a little bit, and I've been thinking about this in the course of the last several days, because a friend of mine, and a man I greatly, greatly admire, John Cardinal O'Connor, just rounded out his life. And he is being much praised these days, very deservedly. He looks back on a life of controversy, and so forth, but, if you look back on a life like that, the one thing you realize is that, whatever the world may say about success or failure or greatness, I think the mark of a truly great life is a life such as his was. It was marked not just by constant successes, and constant applause, and constant popularity, but by a constant sense that there were convictions that mattered, and truths that deserved allegiance, and a substance to life that goes beyond what we ordinarily think of as success.

I remember getting a piece of advice when I started my tenure as ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. I was, at the time I began that chore, very young for the job, or at least some people would have said so. And I remember Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who was my boss and the head of the permanent mission, sitting me down when I first began. She looked at me, and she said words that I have never forgotten. She said, "You know, how things turn out may not depend so much on how you handle the job, as how you handle yourself in the job." I think these days we put altogether too much emphasis on how you handle the job, and how you get it done, and what the results are, and what you got paid for, and what the fruits will be, and what the toys are that you may have to play with at the end of the day.

This may be the motivation for many. But the thing that always grieves my heart, when I look out on a graduating class and think about that, is that, for the folks for whom that is the key motivation, there will be a handful who stand at the pinnacle and enjoy the wealth and all of it, and the rest will be disappointed. Because we're not, most of us, going to grow up to be Bill Gates or Donald Trump. It's not in the cards and it couldn't possibly be. Some may fail. Others may enjoy a modest success, because that's what ordinarily happens to the mass of human beings. And, as you walk on through life, if you're still measuring your life in dollar signs, if you're still trying to figure out who you are, based on what you've got in the bank, and what somebody else says is your success, then step by step, year by year, you will go down that road of quiet desperation that the poet--wrongly, I think--thought to be the inevitable lot of human kind.

But it doesn't have to be that way, see, if you remember that sometimes it's not just what you do in life and what you achieve in life. No. In the course of all of this you're doing more than producing a result here or there, doing a competent job, having a little fun, and so forth. You are becoming someone. You are building a character. You are becoming an idea of human worth. And when all is said and done, when absolutely everything else is stripped from you, at the end of it all when you must contemplate, as we all must do, that moment when everything in this material and temporal plane that you have built and cared about and worked for will come to dust, that idea, that idea, may be the only thing that looks as if it would survive. Not "what did you do" and "what did you have," but "who did you become"--and can you look back on that person with a sense of satisfaction, of joy, of pride.

But, you see, that's something that doesn't matter, at the end of the day, how far you go according to the measure that is used in People Magazine or Forbes. No. There are folks out there--like some of the folks that contributed to your success; like some of the parents who helped to get you here; and some of the guardians; some of the aunts and uncles and friends--people nobody will ever read about in the newspaper, people no one will ever see in the history books, folks who will fade in the course of time from all of human memory, except the hearts and minds of those who, with their love and sacrifice and dedication, with their moments when they thought of someone else more than they thought of themselves, they fashioned hopes and dreams that are now yours, and possibilities that you may become. And then they stepped aside, content not to soar necessarily to the heights, except upon the wings of those that they send forth like you, to be an offering to the future.

It's much more likely, you know, that the bulk of us will be like that. Much more likely that we will have to look back on lives that didn't break the surface, that didn't get more than 30 seconds, much less our 15 minutes, of fame. If this is what you live for, you will be disappointed. But, if you live instead in the hope that there will be deeds in your life when the line between right and wrong was presented to you and you decided, not because someone forced you or because someone paid you or because someone threatened you, but simply because somewhere in your heart you held true to a conviction of your spirit, you decided to do, at whatever the cost, just what you thought was right--

It does not have to be a big thing. It does not have to be a thing on which the world depends. But on that moment of choice when it comes, and however often it comes, may very well depend what you become, and what you have to look back upon in those hours when everything else fades into insignificance, and all you have left to remember are the things that stand up to the test of those standards that do not fade--those things that decide, not on our worth in the bank account, but on the worth of our souls and our characters. Those things, in the end, that are judged not just by the eyes of men that pass, and colleagues that will disappear, but by those eyes that see with the force and power--call it by whatever name you will--that lasts through all the ages, that sees throughout all eternity, and that weighs things up, not by the puny measures of our hopes, but by the true measures of what is good and right and just.

I think if you can stand up to that test then it's very likely that your life won't hold any real disappointment. Because I, unlike some folks, I can't stand up here and say, "Well, just go out, dream as you please, and everything will happen. Success will be yours. All you have to do is believe in yourself!" This is not true. You can believe in yourself all you like. You'll still fail, some of you. But, in the midst of all of that, in the midst of all the things that go wrong, and don't come out right, and don't quite measure up to what you had hoped would be the case as you sit here today--if you are able to believe in something more powerful, more important, more permanent, more true, more good, more just than you are, then you have some hope of real success; then you have some hope that, whatever the world may say, you will become that which is deathless, and which is worthy of the immortality that in the faith of many is the promise of our humanity.

I deeply believe that we live in times when we altogether too much forget this. Our eyes blinded the sunshine of our own material success. But, even for our nation, you know, these times won't last. Nations have their ups and downs, their good times and bad, their travails as well as their triumphs. We meet these things with the resources of our spirit--those resources that we call upon when the bank account is empty, when the military might fails, when the depression hits, when the times are bad, when the friends desert. And, yet, if you have built within yourself that conviction which holds onto things that are true and sees a goodness and worth in yourself not measured by anything outside your own true heart and faithful conviction, then all those things will come and go, but you will remain a faithful soul, ready to meet that destiny which is marked out for us, not in the course of this little time we spend, but in the course of that eternity which, though dark to us, may yet be lit by the little candle of our souls.

So, I would like to offer to you, as I'm supposed to do, I suppose, a word of encouragement. Because with the good help that you have gotten from friends, and colleagues, and dedicated teachers at this great institution, you lay a foundation. But then, as I'm suppose to do, but as some folks forget to do these days, I'll offer you as well an admonition. An admonition is a piece of advice that comes in the form of a warning, and this one someone offered to me early in my career in government--and I thank God that I never forgot it; because, if I had, I would have probably lost myself long ago. We have to go out in this world, and you can sell your talent. You can sell your knowledge. You can sell your time and you can sell your labor. You will be bought and sold on the auction block of many different marketplaces where all of these things will be toted up and valued by others and you eventually, too, will be the judge. But, if you are going to follow my advice today and remember nothing else, then just remember this. There's not a single thing on offer in this all-too-temporary world for which you should ever sell your soul.

Hold on to this. Be true to that in you which, if you are willing to respect its truth, will not fail, will never desert, and will in the end not turn into dust, even when you have shuffled off this mortal coil. For, I think that there is a light in us, a little spark of God's divinity. And, if we husband and shelter its truth, then we can make it into a light that glows beyond the edges of this time--to light a path to others, in our families, in our nation, in the world. But, also, to be a light whose spreading ripples in the voids of time we cannot calculate, and whose ultimate fate we do not know.

In some sense, I think, this is a home we can build for our humanity that lasts beyond anything else we can hope for. Be true to that little promise of it that you have, and come what may, your life will be, in your own eyes and in the eyes of God, the success you hope for.

God bless you.