Not only did landmark civil rights advances grow out of the sit-ins and marches, but we sawthe EPA and the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act and allof it come out of Earth Day in 1970. We saw women refusing to take a back-seat, forceinstitutions to respond, producing Title IX and a Yale University that quickly transformedfrom a male bastion of 1966. Citizens, including veterans of the war, spoke up and brought ourtroops home from Vietnam.
The fact is that what leaps out at me now is the contrast between those heady days and today.Right or wrong, and like it or not – and certainly some people certainly didn’t like it – back theninstitutions were hard pressed to avoid addressing the felt needs of our country.
Indeed, none of what I’ve talked about happened overnight. The pace of change was differentfrom today. The same fall that my class walked in as freshmen, Nelson Mandela walked intoprison. It wasn’t until 30 years later, when my daughter walked through these gates for thefirst time, that Mandela was his country’s president.
When I was a senior, the debate over the growing war in Vietnam was becoming allconsuming. But it took another seven years before combat ended for our country, and morethan 25,000 lives. And it wasn’t until the year 2000 that we finally made peace and normalizedrelations. Now, amazingly, we have more Vietnamese studying in America – including some inyour class – than from almost any other country in the world.
What’s notable is this daring journey of progress played out over years, decades, and evengenerations. But today, the felt needs are growing at a faster pace than ever before, piling upon top of each other, while the response in legislatures or foreign capitals seems nonexistentor frozen.
It’s not that the needs aren’t felt. It’s that people around the world seem to have grown used toseeing systems or institutions failing to respond. And the result is an obvious deepeningfrustration if not exasperation with institutional governance.
The problem is today’s institutions are simply not keeping up or even catching up to the feltneeds of our time. Right before our eyes, difficult decisions are deferred or avoided altogether.Some people even give up before they try because they just don’t believe that they can make adifference. And the sum total of all of this inaction is stealing the future from all of us.
Just a few examples, from little to big: a train between Washington and New York that can go150 miles-per-hour – but, lacking modern infrastructure, goes that fast for only 18 miles of thetrip; an outdated American energy grid which can’t sell energy from one end of the country tothe other; climate change growing more urgent by the day, with 97 percent of scientists tellingus for years of the imperative to act. The solution is staring us in the face: Make energypolicy choices that will allow America to lead a $6 trillion market. Yet still we remain gridlocked;immigration reform urgently needed to unleash the power – the full power of millions who livehere and make our laws in doing so both sensible and fair.
And on the world stage, you will not escape it – even more urgency. We see huge, growingpopulations of young people in places that offer little education, little economic or politicalopportunity. In countries from North Africa to East Asia, you are older than half theirpopulation. Forty percent of their population is younger than Yale’s next incoming class.
If we can’t galvanize action to recognize their felt needs – if we don’t do more to coordinatean attack on extreme poverty, provide education, opportunity, and jobs, we inviteinstability. And I promise you, radical extremism is all too ready to fill the vacuum leftbehind.
What should be clear to everyone – and it’s perhaps what makes our current predicament,frankly, so frustrating – is that none of our problems are without solutions. None of them. Butneither will they solve themselves. So for all of us, it’s really a question of willpower, notcapacity. It’s a matter of refusing to fall prey to the cynicism and apathy that have alwaysbeen the mortal enemies of progress. And it requires keeping faith with the ability ofinstitutions – of America – to do big things when the moment demands it. Remember whatNelson Mandela said when confronted by pessimism in the long march to freedom: “It alwaysseems impossible until it is done.”