Congratulations, I'm proud of each and every one of you. This past year has been an extraordinarily difficult year for our country and for the world. The times of loss and anxiety and disruption, and I know you felt it too, losing loved ones and friends. Losing time with each other. But you've been incredibly resilient, and you're ready for what comes next. No graduating class gets to choose the world in which they graduate. Every class enters the history of the nation up to the point that has been written by others. But few classes, once in every few generations, enters at a point in our history where it actually has a chance to change the trajectory of the country. Just three years after I stood where you're standing, two of my political heroes, Dr. King and Robert Kennedy, were gunned down. The Vietnam War divided the nation and divided families. We're in the midst of a great movement for civil rights, women's rights, and environmental rights. We -- we faced an -- an inflection point, and we did our best to seize that moment, because things were changing so rapidly, and now you face another inflection point. As we put this pandemic behind us, rebuild our economy, root out systemic racism, and tackle climate change, we're addressing the great crises of our time with a greater sense of purpose than ever before. And because of you -- your generation -- I've never been more optimistic about the future than I am today. You represent one of the most gifted and talented and well-educated generations in American history, and you're, going to see more change in the next 10 years than you saw -- than we saw in the last 50 years. But it's going to be up to you -- it's going to be up to you to translate that unprecedented change into a greater measure of happiness and prosperity for not only you and our nation, but for the world around you -- and I know you will. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney once wrote: "History says, don't hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history can rhyme." Graduates: you have a chance to make hope and history rhyme. So congratulations. Go out and do what you can. May God bless you and your families.
