Ten years ago, in cap and gown, I stood in this place to receive an
honorary degree - a happening which only compounded an
already heavy burden of guilt. I had always figured the first degree
you gave me was honorary.
That first degree was thirty-five years and a few months ago.
Now, as far as you students are concerned, that makes it definite I
am not of your generation. There are those with differing
political views who would go even further and place me as far back
as the Ice Age some even further to the time of McKinley.
Some here today, however, can bear witness that thirty- five years are
like thirty-five minutes, so clear and fresh is memory. No
matter how much you students may want to believe this, your imaginations
are not quite up to it. you will just have to wait and
find out for yourselves. But you will find out.
There is a tendency in today's world to put more than years between
us. Somehow, as humans, we have been stratified into a
horizontal society instead of vertical. Layers of humanity are separated
into age groups from preschool to those the social
thinkers refer to as senior citizens. And somehow we are losing our
ability to establish communications between layers. What is
even worse, there is a growing hostility between these layers.
It is an unnatural situation. Humanity is vertically structured. The
teenager will become the young married or junior executive,
and, in turn, the middle-aged and eventually the senior citizen. Each
one of us will take his faults and virtues, his pluses and
minuses, through the years, being at all times the sum total of all
he has experienced.
This separation into horizontal layers makes no sense at all. What of
this talk that no one over thirty understands the youth of
today? If this is true, then what happens when you reach thirty? Do
you suddenly join us and quit understanding those who have
not quite reached the magic age?
Each generation is critical of its predecessor. As the day nears when
classroom and playing field must give way to the larger
arena with its problems of inequality and human misunderstanding, it
is easy to look at those in that arena and demand to know
why the problems remain unsolved. We who preceded you asked that question
of those who preceded us and another younger
generation will ask it of you.
I hope there will be less justification for the question when it is
your turn to answer. What I am trying to say is that no generation
has failed completely, nor will yours succeed completely.
But don't get me wrong. When the generation of which I am a part leaves
the stage, history will record that seldom has any
generation fought harder or paid a higher price for freedom.
We have known three wars and now a fourth, a cataclysmic worldwide depression
that toppled governments and reshaped the
map. And, because we could not find the single cure-all for man's inhumanity
to man or the answer to human frailty, we have
downgraded our performance and confused you as well as ourselves.
It is easy to point to the failures and talk of the mess of our times,
and even to promise we will do better. But for the record,
since we are the generation that exploded the atomic bomb and brought
a permanent terror to the world, we also harnessed the
atom for peaceful purposes. And some of those peaceful purposes, in
medicine and industrial power, have brought man to the
threshold of a fabulous era.
We have defeated polio and tuberculosis and a host of plague diseases
that held even more terror for mankind than the threat
of the bomb. It is a certainty that your generation and ours will overlap
in defeating cancer.
Point an accusing finger and list smog, water pollution, poverty, civil
rights, inequality of opportunity. We still seek the answers,
and, while many of us disagree as to the solutions, we were the ones
who faced up to the problems and charged ourselves with
finding the answers. No one in public life fails to treat these problems.
This horizontal stratification has led to lateral communication, and
it is highly essential that we restore vertical dialogue, if not an
outright recognition of the naturalness and rightness of a vertical
structuring of society.
How well do young people understand those whose defect is age thirty-plus?
Can you possibly believe your fathers who knew
the savagery of World War II or your grandfathers who came of age in
the muddy trenches of the Great War could possibly
have an affection for war? That we would callously send our sons to
war?
Permit me here to build at least a footbridge between the age groups
of parent and child, remembering that bridges are open to
traffic both ways.
That fellow with the thickening waist and the thinning hair who is sometimes
unreasonable about your allowance or letting you
have the car... his life seems a little dull to you now as he reports
for his daily 9 to it chores, or looks forward to lowering a golf
handicap, or catching a fish no one wants to eat.
I wish you could have known him a few years back on a landing craft
at Normandy or Tarawa or on a weekend pass in Peoria.
He was quite a guy. Winston Churchill said he was the only man in the
world who could laugh and fight at the same time.
General [George] Marshall called him our secret weapon. He hated war
more than he hated the enemy, but he did what had to
be done.
A few years after the end of World War II, I was in a little pub in
rural England. The motherly soul who was waiting on trade
figured out I was an American (for the life of me, I don't know how).
She began to reminisce. "During the war," she said, "some
of your chaps were stationed just across the road. They used to come
in here and have song-fests. They called me Mom and
my husband Pop. It was Christmas Eve and we were here all alone when
the door burst open and there they were with
presents for us." she paused for a tear or two and then said: "Big
strappin' lads they was from a place called 'Iowa'."
I know those over-thirty fellows probably don't tell it very well so
that you can see them as they were then, but they all knew
what it was like to dream, to say good-bye to a girl and wonder when,
if ever, they would see her again. They missed a world
that let things like that happen, and swore they would do better when
they got back and were running the show.
They came back from war and created an organization to outlaw war, and
we have not known a single minute's peace since.
The dream was a good dream, no effort was spared and we continue to
pour out our treasure to make the dream come true.
Proving again our vertical structures this problem will be yours as
well as ours to solve.
It wasn't that we faltered or lacked in willingness. There are organizational
difficulties that could not have been foreseen. New
and emerging nations with neither power nor responsibility for controlling
world forces have a disproportionate voice in world
councils. A two-thirds majority can be mustered among a half hundred
nations who represent less than 10 percent of the
world's population.
Are the problems of urban ghettoes and poverty the result of selfishness
on our part or indifference to suffering? No people in
all the history of mankind have shared so widely its material resources.
We taxed ourselves more heavily and extended aid at home and abroad.
And when the problems grew, we planned more and
passed more legislation to add to the scores of programs, until today,
they are listed in government catalogues of hundreds of
pages. We who are called materialist have tried to solve human problems
with material means. We have forgotten man's
spiritual heritage; we have placed security above freedom and confused
the citizen's responsibility to society with society's
responsibility to the individual.
We have to re-study some of our social legislation, legislation that
meant well, but has failed in its goals or has created greater
problems than the ones it was meant to cure.
We have to re-examine our individual goals and aims.
What do we want for ourselves and our children? Is it enough to have
material things? Aren't liberty and morality and integrity
and high principles and a sense of responsibility more important?
The world's truly great thinkers have not pointed us toward materialism;
they have dealt with the great truths and with the high
questions of right and wrong, of morality and of integrity.
They have dealt with the question of man, not the acquisition of things.
And when civilizations have disregarded their findings,
when they have turned to the things of the flesh, they have disappeared.
You are concerned with us and what seems to be hypocrisy and lack of
purpose on our part. And we in turn are concerned
about you, seeing a rising spirit of unrest, aimlessness, and drifting,
a feeling of rebellion without a real cause that results
sometimes in meaningless but violent actions. Now, let me make it plain.
I am aware that all of you are unfairly suspect because
of a very small percentage of dissidents.
Nevertheless, you do seek a purpose and a meaning to life, and apparently
we have failed to give it to you. But, again, our
failure was not one of bad intent.
We are the classic example of giving to you what we never had from TV
to wheels and dental care to Little League. But I am
afraid we shortchanged you on responsibilities or the right to earn
for yourselves.
All too often, because we had to earn, we wanted to give. our motives
have been laudable, but our judgment has been bad.
"No" was either a dirty word or dropped from our vocabulary.
Some time ago in Newport, California, a row of luxurious oceanfront
homes were threatened by an abnormally high tide and
heavy surf. All through the day and night, volunteers worked, piling
sandbags, in an effort to save these homes. Local TV
stations, aware of the drama, covered the struggle. It was about 2
A.M. when one newscaster grabbed a young fellow in his
teens, attired only in wet trunks. He had been working all day and
night one of several hundred of his age group. No, he did not
live in one of the homes they were trying to save, and, yes, he was
cold and tired. The newscaster inevitably got around to why.
The answer was so poignant, such an indictment of so many of us, it
should be on a billboard across the nation. He said: "Well,
I guess it's the first time we've ever felt like we were needed."
You are needed; we need your courage, your idealism, your new and untried
viewpoint. You know more than we did at your
age; you are brighter, better informed, even healthier. And because
human kind is vertically structured, we can take a little
credit for that. But, you want a purpose, a cause, a banner to follow,
and we owe you that.
A few years ago, a national magazine did a series of articles by prominent
people including a president, a vice- president, and
distinguished statesmen. Each wrote his idea of what was our national
purpose. Somehow, nothing very exciting or profound
resulted from these articles. I have always felt it was because they
tried to invent something we already have and have had for
two hundred years. Our national purpose is to unleash the full talent
and genius of the individual, not to create mass movements
with the citizenry subjecting themselves to the whims of the state.
Here, as nowhere in the world, we are established to provide
the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order.
Today, we dedicate this library because Wesley and Clinton Melick have
thought not in horizontal lines of just their associates
in time. you want a purpose, something to believe in? You might try
resolving that you will contribute something to generations
unborn a handhold above your own achievement so that another generation
can climb higher and achieve more.
This library is more than a beautiful and functional building. It is
first and foremost a repository of knowledge and culture. More
facts will be available in this one library than were available in
all the libraries of the world a hundred years ago.
That shouldn't surprise you.
Man's knowledge has increased at such a rapid rate since the turn of
the century that any book of facts written then would be
obsolete now, both in terms of what we know to be true and also what
we know to be true no longer.
But a library is more than just a place to go for facts. A library is
also a place to go for wisdom. And the purpose of an
educational institution is to teach not only knowledge, but also wisdom.
Someone once said that people who want to understand democracy should
spend less time in the library with Aristotle and
more time on buses and subways.
In a way, that may be true.
But to understand democracy is not necessarily to solve its problems.
And I would venture to say Aristotle, and those others whom you will
find not in the buses and subways, but instead in this
building here, will give you more answers and more clues to the solutions
of our problems than you are likely to find on the
buses and subways.
Maybe the best answer is to be found in both, but do not let the library
go to waste because you are awaiting the completion of
Eureka's first subway.
Now, when I suggest that we turn to books, to the accumulated knowledge
of the past, I am not suggesting that we turn back
the clock or retreat into some dim yesterday that we remember only
with nostalgia, if at all. But we must learn from yesterday
to have a better tomorrow.
We are beset by problems in a complex world; we are confused by those
who tell us only new and untried ways offer hope.
The answers to all the problems of mankind will be found in this building
by those who have the desire to find them and
perception enough to recognize them.
There will be the knowledge of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, and from
the vantage point of history, their mistakes. We can
look back and see where pure democracy became as dictatorial as a sultan
and majority rule without protection for the minority
became mob rule.
One of mankind's problems is that we keep repeating the same errors.
For every generation some place, two plus two has
added up to three, or in another place, five four seems to elude some
of us. This has happened in my generation and I predict,
without smugness, it will happen to yours.
But, these two men here today have given something almost beyond comprehension.
Do you doubt the answers can be found here? From the eleventh century,
Maimonides, Hebrew philosopher and physician, will
give you the eight steps in helping the needy to help themselves.
Can you name one problem that would not be solved if we had simply followed
the teachings of the man from Galilee? We can
redirect our nation's course into the paths of freedom and morality
and high principle.
And, in so directing it, we can build better lives for ourselves and
our children and a better nation for those who come after us,
or we can ignore history and go the way of Greece and Rome.
I think that this is the significance of this library. The fact that
we can use it to rechart our course, not into the great unknown,
but onto paths that are clear and which, if followed, can show us how
to cope with the new problems that always confront each
generation and can lead us, as a people, on to continued greatness.
There were many who had a hand in this, but they would be the first
to say it happened because of you, Woes and Clint
Melick. On behalf of all of us who knew Eureka and those still to come,
we thank you. Eureka means "We have found a way
of life." you have made the search much easier.
Return
to the Reagan at Eureka Photo Essay Index