Keeping the flame alive

Today's world is extraordinarily complex and perpetually in flux. Issues concerning personal values and rights, political and economic systems, and divergence of culture and nationality, coupled with the 21^st century realities of the burgeoning information technology economy and globalization, everyday create a closer and more interdependent world.

And while the birth of this new world carries with it the limitless promise of increased prosperity and peace for all humankind, it also carries with it the inevitable reality of widespread societal problems in which many will be unequipped, or even disallowed, to enjoy the prosperity that is rightly promised to us all. It is for this reason that our dedication to and training in our Public Policy major is so indispensable.

As future public policy makers, we have the skills, knowledge-base, and drive to sufficiently address the problems of inequality, indifference, violence and human suffering that have plagued our societies and prevented them from realizing the greatness that is so attainable and yet seems so elusive.

We the future public policy makers, armed with a mastery of economics, political science, statistics, ethics and the other disciplines that frame and significantly impact our collective public life, are in a position to craft highly effective and all-inclusive policies, the ends of which will be to eliminate the barriers to success faced by our world communities and by individuals in our society.

Our charge and the responsibilities that we assume as public policy makers are often as broad, complex and varied as the societal problems that we look to solve....

In many ways, public policy makers are like firefighters, only the flames that we attempt to put out are those destructive societal problems that affect segments of our population, but ultimately threaten us all. Just like firefighters, public policy makers respond to emergencies that, much like real fires, have either been maliciously set to harm individuals or have started as a result of sheer negligence.

However contrary to conventional wisdom, responding to fires is not the most important job of firefighters or public policy makers. The most important job is preventing fires from ever occurring in the first place.

Fire departments work tirelessly to ensure that we all take the proper safety measures in our homes, businesses and elsewhere in an effort to lower or eliminate the possibility of a fire ever occurring, as evidenced by the smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, emergency exits and designated fire lanes on streets that have become such a common part of our everyday lives. (Friend's car getting towed = public policy at work).

And, in fact, even after a fire has occurred, fire departments thoroughly search out the cause of the flame and utilize the knowledge yielded by their investigations to become better firefighters and to educate everyone on how to protect themselves and their communities. This, in many ways, is exactly what our public policy training has prepared us to do.

As it relates to the practice of public policy, the idea of fire does, however, have a good connotation as well. The fire that I am referring to in this sense is the flame that resides within all of today's public policy graduates and is representative of our deep passion and commitment to making our collective public life the absolute best that it can possibly be.

This is a "common fire" that has developed within all of us largely as a result of our own personal experiences, and I would like to briefly share with you one experience in my life that forever kindled my own passion for public service.

During the summer of 1998, I had the opportunity to work as a research assistant to the late Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA. As many of you may know, Judge Higginbotham, or "the Judge" as he insisted that everyone call him, is regarded by many as one of the greatest jurists, historians, legal scholars and litigators in this nation's history.

While all of his credentials and accomplishments are too numerous to list, they include his being the first African-American trustee of both the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, the youngest person and the first African-American ever to serve as a federal level commissioner, the chief judge for the 3^rd Circuit Court of Appeals and the longest serving federal judge in the country during his active duty, and a heavily considered candidate for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. However, what was most impressive about the Judge was the fact that he dedicated his entire life and all of his many talents to the cause of Civil Rights on behalf of individuals who had little voice in our society with which to plead their own case.

When I met the Judge, he was 70 years old and had already survived several major heart surgeries, however his fire and his passion to serve people and attempt to set right in the world that which had been set wrong kept him working, meeting people and putting out the fires that have burned for so long in our society.

His effect on me was inexplicable and when I returned home to my section of Washington, DC where the destructive flames of inequality and lack of opportunity still burn very brightly today, I realized that the Judge, although he did not know me, had spent his entire life fighting to open up the world for me, and was perhaps responsible for many of the opportunities that I, and many others, now enjoy.

This experience forever changed my life and permanently kindled my passion to live in a way that benefits everyone in society through my work in public policy.

In many ways, my experiences with Judge Higginbotham are much the same as our collective experience with the late Terry Sanford. Although most of today's graduates never got the opportunity to meet our extraordinary President Sanford, his passion for the practice of public policy and for bettering our society, has been infused into us during our time here, and his flame has kindled our own, and driven us to continue and augment the rich legacy left us by him and others.

Now that we have this deep passion and fire to make our societies great, how do we maintain it? I have three brief suggestions in this vein for all of our graduates.

First, do not put too many logs on the fire at one time. Taking on too many things at once and personally shouldering all of the world's problems will almost certainly cause you and your flame to burn out.

Second, make sure that you expose your flame to the oxygen of personal interaction, compassion and love. We often put up many steel walls to the outside world including barriers based on race, class, nationality, gender and religion. We must be certain that these barriers do not form an impervious casing around our flame, as the failure to genuinely engage other people will certainly cause our flame to die out and, most likely, make us cold.

Finally, do not move too fast through life, but rather enjoy yourself and everyone and everything around you. While I know we are all anxious to achieve our future goals, make sure that you go forward in a way that does not cause the fast blowing winds of blind ambition to put out your flame and diminish your enjoyment of and passion for life.

If we conduct ourselves in this fashion as we embark upon our very promising and exciting futures, we too will be able to maintain our desire to create a better world for everyone. What is more, when the time comes we will be able to pass our own flame to the next generation of people seeking to continue the changes that we will have made in our lifetime, as did Judge Higginbotham and President Terry Sanford.

Perhaps Elton John's words best sum up our tribute to our late heroes and the path that we, as public policy graduates, should hope to travel in our quest to make the world great. He writes:

To our parents, irony is sometimes the hallmark of public policy and it is therefore fitting that you have paid $120,000 so that your child could learn to put out fires and by doing so, you have helped to spark a perpetual flame and passion in their lives. We thank you, our families, faculty and friends for all that you do.

And I offer my congratulations to The Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy's graduating class of 2000. May your futures be as bright as your passion for others and for life. Thank you.