第6章 Our Common Humanity Matters More 我们共同的人性价值更重要(2)

It‘s also an unsustainable world because of climate change，resource depletion， and the fact that between now and 2050，the world’s supposed to grow from six and a half to nine billion people，with most of the growth in the countries least able to handle it， under today‘s conditions，never mind those. That’s all fixable，too．So is climate change a problem？ Is resource depletion a problem？ Is poverty and the fact that 130 million kids never go to school and all this disease that I work on a problem？ You bet it is. But I believe the most important problem is the way people think about it and each other， and themselves. The world is awash today in political，religious，almost psychological conflicts，which require us to divide up and demonize people who aren‘t us．And every one of them in one way or the other is premised on a very simple idea．That our differences are more important than our common humanity．I would argue that Mother Teresa was asked here，Bono was asked here，and Martin Luther King was asked here because this class believed that they were people who thought our common humanity was more important than our differences．So with this Harvard degree and your incredible minds and your spirits that I’ve gotten a little sense of today， this gives you virtually limitless possibilities. But you have to decide how to think about all this and what to do with your own life in terms of what you really think．I hope that you will share Martin Luther King‘s dream，embrace Mandela’s spirit of reconciliation， support Bono‘s concern for the poor and follow Mother Teresa’s life into some active service. Ordinary people have more power to do public good than everbefore because of the rise of non-governmental organizations， because of the global media culture，because of the Internet，which gives people of modest means the power， if they all agree， to change the world．When former President Bush and I were asked to work on the tsunami，before we did the Katrina work， Americans，many of whom could not find the Maldives or Sri Lanka on a map，gave $1.2 billion to tsunami aid．Thirty percent of our households gave．Half of them gave over the Internet，which means you don‘t even have to be rich to change the world if enough people agree with you. But we have to do this．Citizen service is a tradition in our country about as old as Harvard，and certainly older than the government．When the human genome was sequenced，and the most interesting thing to me as a non-scientist-we finished it in my last year I was president，I really rode herd on this thing and kept throwing more money at it-the most interesting thing to me was the discovery that human beings with their three billion genomes are 99.9 percent identical genetically．So if you look around this vast crowd today， at the military caps and the baseball caps and the cowboy hats and the turbans， if you look at all the different colors of skin，all the heights，all the widths，all the everything，it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our genetic make-up. Don‘t you think it’s interesting that not just people you find appalling，but all the rest of us，spend 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of one percent？ I mean，don‘t we all？ How much of the laugh lines in the speeches were about that？ At least I didn’t go to Yale， right？ That Brown gag was hilarious.