Robert Shetterly - Commencement Address, University of New England
May 12, 2007
   
I am honored and humbled to be at the University of New England   today addressing you at this celebration of your rite of passage. Particularly humbled because I feel an obligation to try to say something of importance, something real. And when I think about reality, I am always reminded of America’s great writer about race and culture, James Baldwin, who once said, “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.”

So, let’s think about that.

Let me begin with a story.

When I was in grade school, I was taught, as we all were, that previous to Marco Polo, European geographers speculated that the world was flat. Explorers in ships should beware. They might sail right over the edge. In my mind, a young boy’s then, was an image of a vast, blue, tabletop sea suspended in a paler blue sky, little ships bobbling along, cartoon sails fat with bountiful breezes, intrepid captains squinting, unseeing, through their spyglasses. The first ship in this picture tipped into the void, a heavily scribbled black abyss way below. The other ships are unable to stop or turn.

Did I choose to imagine myself a sailor? Did I hear the faint “uh-ohs” of dismay rise up from the plummeting ships?

No. I remember childish scorn for the plight of the benighted sailors and their naive worldview. Even as we knew that the explorers were courageous, that we should show some respect for their venturing to the brink, we pitied them for the poverty of their knowledge. Certainly, a bunch of 20th century nine-year-olds had more sense! We knew that the world was round. We knew about gravity. We knew that neither ship nor sailor could sail off the world’s edge - even by choice. We knew about progress. We knew we were superior to our ancestors. We didn’t stand on their shoulders. We couldn’t. They were un-evolved miniatures of a sub-species. We were giants of the future. All forty of us, crowded like sheep in a ship’s hold, in our third grade class room in Cincinnati with our exhausted captain Mrs. Marshall - we all knew we were superior. Ha, ha, we laughed. A flat earth!

Well, because we are smart today, and because the world is round, we know that what goes around comes around. It is gradually dawning on us that Western culture’s entire “civilized” enterprise has been predicated on the assumption of a flat earth. Just as we could sail to the New World without falling over the edge, remove a few Indians, cut down the forests, discover oil, clear farms, build roads, cities and towns, make landfills, then move west and do it again, we have lived as though we could do this forever. Forever blow the tops off mountains, forever exhaust the seas of fish, forever shoot up a toxic brew of chemicals into ourselves and every plant and animal in the world, make a profit and move on. If the supply dwindles, take somebody else’s. The road of prosperity, profit and progress forever unwinding ahead of us. A flat earth indeed, but even better - thank God - one with no edge, inexhaustible. A bottle of fine wine with no bottom; a pizza that magically regenerates its missing wedges. Full stomachs, full wallets, satisfied belches. This visionary flat mother nature keeps growing grass and trees, always hides her treasures where we can find them, and cleans up after us with unconditional indulgence for her sloppy children.

We have failed to learn what it really means that the world is round - that the round earth is a closed spherical aquarium, with only so much clean water, so much clean air, so much oil, and arable soil; so many precious metals, so much tolerance for pollution. We have failed to learn that all living plants, animals, and resources are equal partners.

Imagine us again as smug nine-year-olds. Who is laughing now? Global warming, species extinctions, peak oil, every one of us poisoned with toxic by-products, imperial resource wars raging, fundamentalists calling down the wrath of God, or using God to justify their wrath. Imagine nine-year-olds of the 22nd century being taught to scorn the arrogant self-indulgence of our era - our penchant for calling self-destruction prosperity and progress. Their teacher might compare the flat earth fears of the 14th century geographers to the flat earth appetites of the 20th - call it the era of the armor-plated backhoe. The kids will laugh.


I want to focus for a few minutes on one of the most disturbing moral assumptions of our flat earth culture. It is collateral damage - the term given to civilian individuals killed in a military action who were not “intentionally” targeted. One rarely sees the face or knows the identity of a collateral. It’s a virtual and abstract category in which the victim is never a real person - a kind of discarded ghost. Such is the magic of language and of denial. When you come to think of it, there is probably no more obscenely immoral term than the one that dismisses the importance of other people or animals or plants as collateral damage when their deaths become incidental to the achievement of some military/economic objective. As collateral, the individuals bear the same value as sawdust to a carpenter.
    
The obvious assumption is that our goals and our lives have more significance than theirs, and, further, that we therefore have the right to murder them with no consequence. Precisely because there is no penalty, it must be a right. But what kind of right is it? An inalienable right? A human right? A legal right?  Moral right?  No, it’s really a right of entitlement. Similar to the right we exercise when we build a road through a forest and then run over the raccoon that crosses it. They, the civilians, the raccoons, are the necessary fatalities for our notion of progress.
     
So, the collaterals have been obligated, in effect, to become martyrs for the indiscriminate power that killed them for its own higher cause - martyrs not for their own beliefs, their own right to life, their own volition, but ours. It is as though, by the very fact of their deaths, they are subsumed into a sub-legal category of existence - the category of martyrdom by default. And, as sub-legals, their killers are obligated not to feel remorse.
Collaterals are the blur created by the momentum of our rush to get where we are going. But they must be brought into focus. For in that focus is not only the truth about the nature of the killer’s behavior, but also the key to survival on a sustainable earth. Hypocrisy about the value of other lives is no longer something about which an otherwise decent society may be negligent or cynical; that hypocrisy is tantamount to suicide. By placing economic expansion, resource depletion, and increased consumption before the wisdom of sustainability, which is the wisdom of the earth, we become our own collateral damage - we sail, by choice, off the edge. A culture that embraces collateral damage as morally necessary for its progress is really embracing a death wish, because collateral damage is the same whether it’s a term for Iraqi children or our own drinking water, Mayans in Guatemala or the plague of breast cancer, Africans dying in the hold of a slave ship or global warming. It’s really a term for a mentality, a conscience, a system profoundly out of balance.

When I was in Rwanda last month working in a village of survivors of the 1994 genocide in that country, our group had an extraordinary young man, Louis Gakumba, for our interpreter. Louis speaks four languages and was working for a mining company, a job he got with only a high school education and an enormous ambition to learn. He became one of their leading metallurgists at the age of 24. Two of the people in our group, Terry Tempest Williams and her husband Brooke, had arranged for Louis to come to the United States to go to college in Salt Lake City. We were all invited to go to Louis’s going away party in the town of Gisenyi. Louie’s co-workers and bosses from the mining company gave long, moving testimonials to Louis about his warmth, intelligence, and importance to them. They all spoke about how excited they were for him. Very few Rwandans escape the poverty of that country. He was feted as a much loved favorite son embarking on a quest to fulfill his promise. But everyone who spoke reminded Louis about his obligation to return to Rwanda once he had acquired his new education and skills. They stressed that his promise included them, that his destiny was theirs, too, and that his personal destiny would only be fulfilled when he fulfilled his responsibility to his community.

We have been in the habit in this country of sending college graduates out into the world as though their destinies involved only their personal successes. Send us a postcard from LA or New York when you’re rich and famous so we can say that we knew you when.  As though your obligation to community is to become a celebrity, or, more mundanely, a diligent consumer to keep the economy going. As though the piece of the fabric you take with you when you leave won’t be missed by the threadbare cloth. Well, the truth is we need you as much as Louis’s genocide ravaged community in Rwanda needs him. The future of our communities is depending on you. The larger problems that I have spoken about have happened as much as anything because we have failed to take care of each other at home, while we cared more for TV characters than our friends, listened more to political spin and hate speech than our own hearts, thought that the answer to alienation was anti-depressants and more stuff. Your lives will have meaning; not because you make a lot of money and have lot of expensive toys, but because you lend your work and care to the common good. If we are to survive in some form of decent, sustainable future, it will take a new commitment to community. Local and global.

We need through our own great collective strength and will to bend and mold our flattened earth back into a sphere. We need to reject the notion of collateral damage for ourselves and all living things. My friend, Perry Mann from West Virginia, says, “No lobbyist can bribe nature. In the end all politicians and everyone else must accept the mandates of nature and the consequences of violating them. In that is my optimism.” He says that is his optimism because he knows that reality resides finally in nature. Politicians can spin you so you vote for them, corporations can seduce you with their SUVs and wonder drugs, the media can tell you only the news they want you to know, the government can lie you into war, but nature won’t be spun, fooled, seduced, tricked or lied to. As Rachel Carson once said, “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.” We may have moved beyond the Neanderthal age of biology, but we’re still blinded by our own convenience. We have to act in accordance with nature, not against it, because nature’s reality will always trump ours. William Sloane Coffin, the great religious leader and social activist asked the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” “No”, he said, “I am my brother’s brother or sister.” A keeper implies a relationship of power and condescension. A brother or sister is equal. And we have to recognize that all creatures in the web of life are also our brothers and sisters. Equal. Coffin also said that without courage there are not other virtues. Compassion, integrity, truth, and justice all require courage, and acts of courage. We can no longer exalt the self-centered luxury of thinking that our own success in the world has meaning apart from the success of communities, and that our communities are independent of all other living communities.

Finally, the most profound good, and the only sustainable good, is the common good. My generation has largely failed to understand that. And has consequently placed a great burden on you.  But the burden of re-organizing our social and economic lives to be in harmony with the earth will also be a great source of joy. I envy you that. To my generation, security meant a nest egg comprised of shares in Exxon and Enron, Lockheed Martin and Halliburton. To yours, security will mean caring for the nest and the egg, the miraculous but frail continuity of life. That is your charge.

Terry Tempest Williams wrote at the close of her book Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, “The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.” At this moment one can only imagine the hurt and scorn, disbelief and tears, sorrow and rage in the future’s eyes. Your job, and your great joy, will be to make those eyes shine and smile again.

I thank you in advance.