[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 96 (Thursday, July 1, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1480-E1481]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              WHAT WILL BE

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR.

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, July 1, 1999

  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, the most respected living Tennessean is 
former Senator Howard Baker.
  He had a very distinguished career in the Senate, having served 18 
years. He also served 2 years as President Ronald Reagan's Chief of 
Staff.
  He is a very successful lawyer in private practice in both Knoxville, 
TN, and Washington, DC.
  Mr. Speaker, recently Senator Baker was asked to give the 
commencement address at the University of Virginia. I have attached a 
copy of his remarks that I would like to call to the attention of my 
colleagues and other readers of the Record.

                            ``WHAT WILL BE''

       It is a great honor to have been asked to be here today for 
     what may be the most important day of your lives thus far. I 
     congratulate you on your academic success. I commend the 
     administration and faculty of this great university for 
     educating you so splendidly. And I rejoice with your parents 
     in their newly found economic freedom.
       Recognizing that I am all that stands between you and your 
     diplomas, I promise first of all to follow Winston 
     Churchill's famous advice on public speaking: ``Be sincere. 
     Be brief. Be seated.''
       In thinking about these remarks, two books I read recently 
     came to mind--one about the past and the other about the 
     future.
       Robert Lacey's The Year 1000 tells about life in England at 
     the turn of the last millennium.
       In those ancient days, life was different. It was a silent 
     world, free of the noise of machinery or media and pungent 
     with the aromas of nature. People worked hard, with their 
     hands, and solved riddles for amusement. Theirs was a world 
     of small villages and few people, and last names were just 
     beginning to be used to distinguish one John or Elizabeth 
     from another.
       They spoke Englisc, a precursor to our own English 
     language, which had already proven its remarkable 
     adaptability, simplicity and poetry. (In this age of Jerry 
     Springer, it is interesting to note that there were no curse 
     words in Englisc. One could swear to something but not at 
     anyone.)
       They put hot lances on sores, and they used leeeches to 
     draw disease from their bodies in deadly torrents of blood. 
     Their scholarship consisted of copying the ancient texts of 
     Greece and Rome. They clung to some of the pagan 
     superstitions of their recent ancestors, but they had 
     converted thoroughly to Christianity, and they kept faith 
     with the one true church in Rome.
       They knew they were living at the end of the first 
     millennium, and this knowledge filled them with dread. This 
     had nothing to do with Y1K computer glitches. The people of 
     tenth-century ``Engla-lond'' were sure that the Devil was 
     about to be released upon the earth after a thousand years of 
     confinement, as the Bible's Book of Revelation foretold.
       They worried, more generally, about the future itself. A 
     tenth-century Old English poem, entitled ``The Fortunes of 
     Men,'' offers a variety of possible fates but leaves open the 
     question of how each life will evolve. For the young men and 
     women at the end of the 10th century, as of the 20th, the 
     question of ``what will be'' dominated all others.
       And just as the first millennium was about to pass, there 
     appeared on the scene a remarkable invention. It was the 
     abacus, the tenth century's version of a computer, and it 
     would change everything in the next thousand years.
       The centrality of such ingenious tools to human progress is 
     the thesis of another book that came to mind in preparation 
     for today. It is a remarkable little volume called The Sun, 
     The Genome and The Internet, in which the author, Freeman J. 
     Dyson of Princeton, argues that three new practical tools 
     will yield similarly extraordinary changes in the life you 
     will live in decades to come.
       Dr. Dyson suggests that solar power perhaps, will finally 
     end our dependence on the thermodynamic cycle.
       He predicts that the mapping of the human genome, now well 
     underway, will yield medical knowledge and practices so 
     sophisticated as to make our present-day surgeries seem as 
     barbaric as leeching and hot lances seem to us today.
       And he sees in the Internet the ultimate democracy of 
     knowledge, spreading inexorably to the remotest village on 
     Earth with stunning consequences for us all.
       If what Dyson foresees is true, you may look back fifty 
     years from now on your world of 1999 as impossibly quaint and 
     primitive, at least technologically. But if he is wrong, you 
     may long for the world you see around you on this golden 
     Virginia day.
       What will be?
       Will you save the world from environmental degradation, or 
     will global warming wash you away?
       Will you thrive in a professional world that rewards 
     enterprise and courage, or will you be ground down in a 
     working world that consumes all your time and steals your 
     soul?
       Will you live in a social world that truly values the 
     content of one's character over the color of one's skin, or 
     will you be mired in an unhappy world of grievance and anger?
       Will you live in a political world that prizes civility and 
     common achievement, or in a world where the quest for 
     ideological purity or partisan advantage renders public 
     service intolerable?

[[Page E1481]]

       Will you live in a moral world that recognizes and honors 
     clear standards of right and wrong, or in the swamp of 
     situational ethics?
       Or will you, like every generation before you, muddle 
     through between these extremes as best you can?
       The temptation will be strong in your lives to be 
     mesmerized by the extraordinary things that will happen in 
     your external world.
       Most of you will live a very long time. If the demographers 
     and scientists are right, many of you will live to be a 100 
     years old.
       In the span of my life, we have gone from Lindbergh's solo 
     flight across the Atlantic to putting men on the moon. We 
     have gone from crude crystal radio sets to television to the 
     internet. We have gone from summers filled with fear of 
     contracting polio to the eradication of that scourge and many 
     other diseases from the face of the earth.
       Your generation will do a great deal more. You may 
     ultimately consider space travel routine. Colonies on the 
     moon are will within your reach. And there will be much more 
     progress, many more practical tools, in your time than any 
     generation, more than can even be imagined.
       But I would urge you not to neglect the internal like--the 
     life of the mind, the heart, the soul--that is the ultimate 
     standard for measuring human progress. Each of you has an 
     opportunity--and, I would suggest, a responsibility--to 
     improve our culture, expand our knowledge, enrich our 
     economy, strengthen our family, care for the outcast, comfort 
     the afflicted, and fulfill the promise of humanity touched 
     with divinity.
       By these measures, we find ourselves today in some ways 
     exactly where we were at the beginning of this century, if 
     not this millennium. Now, as in the early 1900s, we are 
     worried about Serbia. Now, as then, we are concerned about 
     senseless acts of violence. Now, as with the people in the 
     English village in the year 1000, we are helpless against the 
     awesome force of nature.
       Progress is inevitable, but problems, particularly problems 
     between people--can be stubborn, intractable things. On this 
     wonderful spring day, you will be excused for only seeing 
     clear blue skies and limitless possibilities. As it happens, 
     this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of my own graduation 
     from the University of Tennessee, in the State next door.
       In those years, I suffered defeat and frustration in 
     generous measure before success began to smile on me. The 
     world in which I lived experienced economic depression, a 
     world war, a Cold War, racial hatred and violence, terrorism 
     and all manner of evils on its way to the prosperity, peach 
     and social progress that embrace you today.
       In my lifetime, it has often seemed as though the devil 
     really was let loose on the world, and our job was to chain 
     him up again.
       My point is this: hopeful as you are today, as full of 
     promise and potential and learning and achievement as you are 
     today, life has a way of mocking your hopes and frustrating 
     your dreams. The secret to success in life is not giving up 
     when this happens, as it inevitably will.
       The great glory of the American people is not that we have 
     prospered without challenge, but that we have prospered 
     through challenge. That is your heritage, and this is the 
     sturdy foundation on which you stand today.
       You are promising young men and women who have made your 
     parents, your siblings your friends, and even the faculty of 
     this great university enormously proud of you.
       An extraordinary new world beckons you, and a few ancient 
     miseries still beg you for relief. You are like Mr. 
     Jefferson's Crops of Discovery, a small intrepid band 
     venturing into the unknown, as well prepared as you can be 
     but with no reliable map to guide you through the 
     undiscovered country that is the future.
       Congratulations, and may you live of success, service, and 
     grace.
       God bless you all.

       

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