I read a speech given to a graduating class by a philosopher the other day and it was largely a statement about not working too hard or dreaming too big. It made some valid points but it could never make me accept that big dreams are not worth the pain. Human society is far more complex than we can imagine when we are young, and life is often far more difficult than we might wish it to be. Still, great things are accomplished by the many dreamers among us; especially by those who approach their dreams through their work. Jonas Salk dreamed of conquering polio when I was a child and that dread disease is gone from much of the earth. Many dreamers combined their efforts to solve the puzzle of the human genome, and with the brilliance of their efforts we are now using the information they developed to launch new assaults on diseases and genetic defects. Some of us merely dream of safety and peace, they are living lives of quiet despair in places we in this nation seldom consider.

I have been lucky enough to live in this nation all of my life, and it has been truly good to me and to those I love. Oh yes we have recessions and poverty and broken homes aplenty here, but we also have the freedom to dream and make our dreams real like no other nation on earth has ever offered. Humanity is a simple enough thing in the final analysis; given nurturing adequate food and love most humans will live lives that reward them with success and their fellow humans with their efforts. I disagree with a lot of things that are part of this society but I love it with all of the emotional strength that sixty years have bestowed on me. I was nurtured in spite of the poverty of my parents and the loss of my father at three years of age. I was given the great gift of hope and faith in the America I lived in then and the strength to contribute to its struggle to make human life better everywhere. That dream, of humanity freed to realize its potential, is the greatest dream of all, and we the people living in this nation were given it by our predecessors.

That dream we take so for granted can be destroyed by too much reliance on the government, but that is not our way. Here we are the government, nowhere on earth was that true before we made it so. It is an immense gift and an awesome responsibility that we have in our hands. Our efforts to share that dream may sometimes be perverted by our leadership, or be hijacked for the benefit of powerful special interest groups within our nation but sharing that dream remains our responsibility. In order to offer other people the chance to participate in that dream we must reckon with the limits of the use of our power to change the rest of the world. The hardest thing about having power is that then it obligates you to learn how to use it appropriately. Power confers a greater obligation on us because we have that dream to protect and nourish for our children and the rest of the world.

I often dream of helping to create a world where people live in harmony with one another and their environment; so have many of the people in the world outside of our nation. It is clear and evident that that task will not be complete when I die, but it is a worthy goal even if it can never be fully realized. I share that dream with you who would create that world through your efforts at diplomacy and those of you who would use power to force it into being. It is because the hope of humanity is so wrapped up in those efforts that I cannot conceive of ever really retiring. My time is too precious and short for that to be a goal of mine. Please join with one another, even if ways and means cannot be completely agreed upon, to make those great dreams reality. God bless and keep you our troops our protestors and our dreamers safe now and always.