克林顿2007年哈佛大学毕业纪念日的演讲

克林顿2007年哈佛大学毕业纪念日的演讲 英文版

June 1, 2007

Thank you very much, Samantha, Stephanie, Chris, all the marshals, all the student speakers. Thanks for the gags and the jokes, and you know, when I got invited to do this, it was humbling in some ways. They asked Bill Gates to be the Commencement speaker. He's got more money than I do and he went to Harvard.

And I brought my friend Glenn Hutchins here with me, who's at his 30th reunion and he had something to do with overseeing the endowment and he explained that Gates was really, really, really rich and I was just rich.

And then I thought, well, the students asked me and that's good and besides, I don't have to wear a robe.But I couldn’t figure out why on what is supposed to be a festive and informal day, you would pick a gray-haired 60-year-old to speak.

Following the great tradition of Al Franken, Will Ferrell, Borat or Ali G or whoever he was that day. Conan O'Brien, that Family Guy person. What a tradition. So I did like Talladega Nights, however. Then I was reading all I could find out about the class and I thought well, they don't have any fun today. They already had fun. They had this class-wide Risk tournament around exam time.

And I understood when I heard the followership speech, I understood why you had that. Now you can all run for president. You played Risk. It's an eight-year Risk tournament. Then I thought well, maybe it's because you're about to name Drew Faust your next president, and I think women should run everything now. And then I figure maybe it's just because Robin Williams and Billy Crystal turned you down. But for whatever reason, we're here and I have had a really good time.

You've already heard most of what you need to hear today, I think. But I want to focus for a minute on the fact that these graduating classes since 1968 have invited a few non-comedians. First was Martin Luther King, who was killed in April before. I remember that very well because it was my senior year at Georgetown. He was killed in April, before he could come and give the speech. And Coretta came and gave the speech for him here. And you’ve had Mother Teresa and you've had Bono. What do they all have in common? They are symbols of our common humanity and a rebuke even to humorists' cynicism.

Martin Luther King basically said he lived the way he did because we were all caught in what he called an inescapable web of mutuality. Nelson Mandela, the world's greatest living example of that, I believe, comes from a tribe in South Africa, the Xhosa, who call it ubuntu. In English, I am because you are. That led Mother Teresa from Albania to spend her life with the poorest people on earth in Calcutta. It led Bono from his rock stage to worry about innocent babies dying of AIDS, and poor people with good minds who never got a chance to follow their dreams.

This is a really fascinating time to be a college senior. I was looking at all of you, wishing I could start over again and thinking I'd let you be president if you let me be 21.I'd take a chance on making it all over again if I could do it again.

But I think, just think what an exciting time it is. All this explosion of knowledge. Just in the last couple of weeks before I came here, I read that thanks to the sequencing of the human genome, the ongoing research has identified two markers which seem to be high predictors of diabetes, which, as you heard, is a very important thing to me because it's now predicted that one in three children born in the United States in this decade will develop diabetes.We run the risk that we could be raising a first generation of kids to live shorter lives than their parents. Not because we're hungry, but because we don't eat the right things and we don't exercise. But this is a big deal.

Then right after that, I saw that through our powerful telescopes we have identified a planet orbiting one of the hundred stars closest to our solar system, that appears to have the atmospheric conditions so similar to ours that life could actually be possible there.

Alas, even though it's close to us in terms of the great universe, it's still 20 million light-years away. Unreachable in the lifetime of any young person. So unless there's a budding astrophysicist in the class that wants to get married in a hurry and then commit three generations and take another couple with him, we'll have to wait for them to come to us. It's an exciting time.

It's also exciting because of all the diversity. If you look around this audience, I was thinking, I wonder how different this crowd would have looked if someone like me had been giving this speech 30 years ago. And how much more interesting it is for all of us.

It’s a frustrating time, because for all the opportunity, there’s a lot of inequality. There’s a lot of insecurity and there’s a lot of instability and unsustainability. Half the world’s people still live on less than two bucks a day. A billion on less than a dollar a day. A billion people go to bed hungry tonight. A billion people won’t get a clean glass of water today or any day in their lives. One in four of all the people who die this year will die from AIDS, TB, malaria and infections related to dirty water. Nobody in America dies of any of that except people whose AIDS medicine doesn’t work anymore, or people who decline to follow the prescribed regime.

Now remember a few months ago, everybody I knew was shaking their head when we found out that there was a plot in London to put explosive chemicals in a baby bottle to make it look like formula to evade the airport inspection. And every time I ask somebody, I said did you feel a chill go up and down your spine, they said yeah, they did. Because they can imagine being on the airplane, or in my case, I could imagine my daughter, who has to travel a lot on her job, being on the airplane. But here’s what I want to tell you about that. The inequality is fixable and the insecurity is manageable. We’re going to really have to go some in the 21st century to see political violence claim as many innocent lives as it did in the 20th century. Keep in mind you had what, 12 million people killed in World War I, somewhere between 15 and 20 million in World War II, six million in the Holocaust, six million Jews, three million others. Twenty million in the political purges in the former Soviet Union between the two world wars and one afterward. Two million in Cambodia alone. Millions in tribal wars in Africa. An untold but large number in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I mean, we’re going to have to really get after it, if you expect your generation to claim as many innocents from political violence as was claimed in the 20th century. The difference is you think it could be you this time. Because of the interdependence of the world. So yes, it’s insecure but it’s manageable.

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 ever before 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.

Benjamin Franklin organized the first volunteer fire department in Philadelphia 40 years before the Constitution was ratified. When de Tocqueville came here in 1835, he talked among other things about how he was amazed that Americans just were always willing to step up and do something, not wait for someone else to do it. Now we have in America a 1,010,000 non-governmental groups. Not counting 355,000 religious groups, most of whom are involved in some sort of work to help other people. India has a million registered, over a half a million active. China has 280,000 registered and twice that many not registered because they don’t want to be confined. Russia has 400,000, so many that President Putin is trying to restrict them. I wish he wouldn’t do that, but it’s a high-class problem. There were no NGOs in Russia or China when I became president in 1993. All over the world we have people who know that they can do things to change, but again, I will say to all of you, there is no challenge we face, no barrier to having your grandchildren here on this beautiful site 50 years from now, more profound than the ideological and emotional divide which continues to demean our common life and undermine our ability to solve our common problems. The simple idea that our differences are more important than our common humanity.

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.

But it’s all the same deal, isn’t it? I mean, the intellectual premise is that the only thing that really matters about our lives are the distinctions we can draw. Indeed, one of the crassest elements of modern culture, all these sort of talk shows, and even a lot of political journalism that's sort of focused on this shallow judgmentalism. They try to define everybody down by the worst moment in their lives, and it all is about well, no matter whatever’s wrong with me, I’m not that. And yet, you ask Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Bono to come here. Nelson Mandela’s the most admired person in the world. I got tickled the other night. I wound up in a restaurant in New York with a bunch of friends of mine. And I looked over and two tables away, and there was Rush Limbaugh, who’s said a few mad things about me. So I went up and shook hands with him and said hello and met his dinner guest. And I came just that close to telling him we were 99.9 percent the same. But I didn’t want to ruin the poor man’s dessert, so I let it go.

Now we’re laughing about this but next month, I’m making my annual trek to Africa to see the work of my AIDS and development project, and to celebrate with Nelson Mandela his birthday. He’s 89. Don’t know how many more he’ll have. And when I think that I might be 99.9 percent the same as him, I can’t even fathom it. So I say that to you, do we have all these other problems? Is Darfur a tragedy? Do I wish America would adopt sensible climate change regulation? Do I hate the fact that ideologues in the government doctored scientific reports? Do I disagree with a thousand things that are going on? Absolutely. But it all flows from the idea that we can violate elemental standards of learning and knowledge and reason and even the humanity of our fellow human beings because our differences matter more. That’s what makes you worship power over purpose. Our differences matter more. One of the greatest things that's happened in the last few years is doing all this work with former President Bush. You know, I ought to be doing this. I’m healthy and not totally antiquated. He’s 82 years old, still jumping out of airplanes and still doing stuff like this. And I love the guy. I’m sorry for all the diehard Democrats in the audience. I just do. And life is all about seeing things new every day. And I'll just close with two stories, one from Asia, one from Africa. And I’m telling you all the details don’t matter as much as this.

After George Bush and I did the tsunami, we got so into this disaster work that Kofi Annan asked him to oversee the UN’s efforts in Pakistan after the earthquake, which you acknowledged today, and asked me to stay on as the tsunami coordinator for two years. So on my next to last trip to Aceh in Indonesia, the by far the hardest hit place, a quarter of a million people killed. I went to one of these refugee camps where in the sweltering heat, several thousand people were still living in tents. Highly uncomfortable. And my job was to go there and basically listen to them complain and figure out what to do about it, and how to get them out of there more quickly. So every one of these camps elected a camp leader and when I appeared, I was introduced to my young interpreter, a young Indonesian woman, and to the guy who was the camp leader, and his wife and his son. And they smiled, said hello, and then I looked down at this little boy, and I literally could not breathe. I think he’s the most beautiful child I ever saw. And I said to my young interpreter, I said, I believe that’s the most beautiful boy I ever saw in my life. She said, yes, he’s very beautiful and before the tsunami he had nine brothers and sisters. And now they’re all gone.

So the wife and the son excused themselves. And the father who had lost his nine children proceeded to take me on a two-hour tour of this camp. He had a smile on his face. He never talked about anything but what the people in that camp needed. He gave no hint of what had happened to him and the grief that he bore. We get to the end of the tour. It’s the health clinic in the camp. I look up and there is his wife, a mother who had lost nine of her 10 children, holding a little bitty baby less than a week old, the newest born baby in the camp. And she told me, I’m going to get in trouble for telling this. She told me that in Indonesian culture, when a woman has a baby, she gets to go to bed for 40 days and everyone waits on her hand and foot. She doesn’t get up, nothing happens. And then on the 40th day, the mother gets up out of bed, goes back to work doing her life and they name the baby. So this child was less than a week old. So this mother who had lost her nine children is here holding this baby. And she says to me, this is our newest born baby. And we want you to name him. Little boy. So I looked at her and I said through my interpreter, I said, do you have a name for new beginning? And she explained and the woman said something back and the interpreter said yes, luckily for you, in Indonesian the word for dawn is a boy’s name. And the mother just said to me, we will call this child Dawn and he will symbolize our new beginning. You shouldn’t have to meet people that lose nine of their 10 children, cherish the one they got left, and name a newborn baby Dawn to realize that what we have in common is more important than what divides us.

And I leave you with this thought. When Martin Luther King was invited here in 1968, the country was still awash in racism. The next decade it was awash in sexism, and after that in homophobia. And occasionally those things rear their ugly head along the way, but by and large, nobody in this class is going to carry those chains around through life. But nobody gets out for free, and everyone has temptations. The great temptation for all of you is to believe that the one-tenth of one percent of you which is different and which brought you here and which can bring you great riches or whatever else you want, is really the sum of who you are and that you deserve your good fate, and others deserve their bad one. That is the trap into which you must not fall. Warren Buffett's just about to give away 99 percent of his money because he said most of it he made because of where he was born and when he was born. It was a lucky accident. And his work was rewarded in this time and place more richly than the work of teachers and police officers and nurses and doctors and people who cared for those who deserve to be cared for. So he’s just going to give it away. And still with less than one percent left, have more than he could ever spend. Because he realizes that it wasn’t all due to the one-tenth of one percent, and that his common humanity requires him to give money to those for whom it will mean much more.

In the central highlands in Africa where I work, when people meet each other walking, nearly nobody rides, and people meet each other walking on the trails, and one person says hello, how are you, good morning, the answer is not I’m fine, how are you. The answer translated into English is this: I see you. Think of that. I see you. How many people do all of us pass every day that we never see? You know, we all haul out of here, somebody's going to come in here and fold up 20-something thousand chairs. And clean off whatever mess we leave here. And get ready for tomorrow and then after tomorrow, someone will have to fix that. Many of those people feel that no one ever sees them. I would never have seen the people in Aceh in Indonesia if a terrible misfortune had not struck. And so, I leave you with that thought. Be true to the tradition of the great people who have come here. Spend as much of your time and your heart and your spirit as you possibly can thinking about the 99.9 percent. See everyone and realize that everyone needs new beginnings. Enjoy your good fortune. Enjoy your differences, but realize that our common humanity matters much, much more. God bless you and good luck.

克林顿2007年哈佛大学毕业纪念日的演讲 中文版

2007年6月1日

萨曼莎，斯蒂法妮，克里斯，所有的高级军官以及所有的学生发言者，非常感谢你们!谢谢你们演讲中带来的揶揄和笑话!你们可知道，当我受邀到这里来演讲时，我有些受宠若惊。他们邀请比尔·盖茨在毕业典礼上做主题演讲，是因为他的钱比我多而且他上过哈佛。

我偕同我的朋友格伦·哈钦斯于此，这是他第30次故地重游。他负责监督捐款事宜，而且他跟我解释说，比尔·盖茨是极其富有，而我仅仅算得上富有而已。

之后我想这样也好，学生们之前也问过我，此外我不必穿礼服。但是我不明白，为什么在这样一个喜庆而非正式的日子里，你们会邀请一位60岁白发苍苍的老人来演讲。

沿袭艾尔·弗兰肯、威尔·法瑞尔、勃瑞特、阿里·G或者任何和电视剧《搞怪一家人》中科南·奥布赖恩同时代人的优良传统，多么好的一个传统!所以我确实喜欢《塔拉迪加之夜》。然而，当我阅读着所有我能找出的关于毕业班的东西，我认为他们今天没有什么乐趣可享受。但他们已经享受了乐趣，他们在考试临近时参加了这场班级范围的冒险比赛。

听到接下来的演讲后，我能理解你们为什么享受过这种乐趣。现在你们每一个人都能竞选总统。你们参与此“冒险”，这是一场长达八年的冒险比赛。我以为或许是因为你们将要任命德鲁·福斯特为你们的下一届总统，我认为妇女现在应该竞选任何职位。然后我估计可能是仅仅因为罗宾·威廉斯和比利·克里斯拒绝了你们，但是无论出于什么原因，我们来到了这里，我确实在此度过了欢乐时光。

我认为今天你们已经听到大多数你们需要听到的东西，但是此刻我仍想要重点阐述这样一个事实，自1968年以来毕业班已经开始邀请一些非喜剧演员来参加典礼。首先是在多年以前的四月被谋杀的马丁路德·金。那年我在乔治城上大四，所以记忆犹新。在来这里演讲之前，他已经在四月遇害了，最后科雷塔来到这里代替他做了演讲。你们信奉特蕾萨(修女)，你们也崇拜波诺(摇滚歌手)。他们的共性是什么呢?他们是我们普通人性的象征，他们甚至是对幽默大师犬儒主义给予谴责的代表。

总体来说，马丁路德·金是按照他选择的方式来生活的，因为我们都深陷于一个他称之为不可逃脱的相互关联的网中。纳尔逊·曼德拉就是这个世界上最好的活生生的例子，我认为他来自南非的一个部落，科萨人称之为特南斯凯。用英语来说，我是因为你们而存在。这令来自阿尔巴尼亚的特蕾萨修女和加尔各答市最贫穷的人们生活在一起;波诺离开了他的摇滚乐舞台，开始关心那些死于艾滋病的无辜婴儿，以及那些心怀梦想却从没有机会去追寻梦想的穷人。

因此，作为一个大四毕业生，你们的时光是多么美好!看着你们所有人，我多么期盼能重新开始。如果你们能让我重回21岁，我愿意让你们来当总统。如果我能重新做每一件事，我会竭尽全力而为之，使之趋于完美。

我认为仅是个人认为，这是一个多么振奋人心的年代!这是一个知识爆炸的年代!在我来这里的前两周，我了解到多亏有了人类基因组排序，正在进行的研究才得以鉴定出预示糖尿病高发的两大信号。正如你们所知道的那样，这对我们来说很重要，因为我们现在预测到在未来的十年里，美国每出生的三个孩子中就有一个会患上糖尿病。我们竟冒这样的风险抚育一代比父母寿命要短的孩子。这不是因为我们受饿，而是因为我们吃错了东西，以及我们不锻炼。这是一件相当重要的事情。

此之后我还了解到，通过强大的望远镜我们已经观测到，有颗行星绕着最接近于太阳系的一百颗星中的一颗星的轨道运行，似乎那里的大气状况和地球的大气状况很相似，那里可能存在生命现象。

对于整个宇宙而言，虽然它离我们很近，但是它仍然距离我们两千万光年之远。任何一个年轻人用一生的时间都无法到达。因此，除非这班上有一名崭露头角的天文物理学家马上结婚，并且将此事交付于下三代，并和另一对夫妇一起去那里，否则我们必须等待他们到地球来。多么激动人心的时刻啊!

同样令我们振奋的是我们民族的多样性，大家可以环顾一下周围的听众。我刚才在想，如果30年前有一个人像我今天这样在这里做演讲，这群人不知会有多么的不同!对我们所有的人来说，这种翻天覆地的变化是多么地有趣!

那是个令人泄气的年代，所有的机会都存在着不平等，存在着许多不安和不稳定性。世界上一半的人仍然过着每天不到两美金的生活。十亿人每天收入还不到一美金。十亿人每晚食不果腹，十亿人现在或在他有生之年都喝不到一瓶干净的水。而今年死亡人数中将有四分之一的人是死于艾滋病，肺结核、疟疾以及由饮用脏水引起的其他传染病。在美国是没有人死于这些疾病的，除非是有些人的艾滋病药品不再有效或他们没有遵守医嘱。

记得几个月以前，据我所知每个人听到这个消息的时候都不由得直摇头。消息是我们发现在伦敦有一个密谋事件，恐怖分子试图把易爆化学制品放进婴儿奶瓶中，使之看起来像婴儿奶粉配方，以逃避机场人员的检查。每次我问他们是否感觉到一股寒意穿透了脊背，他们说是的，他们确实有这样的感觉。因为他们能想象出乘飞机时遇到这样的情形，或者以我为例，我能想象我的女儿乘飞机时遇到这样的情形。她因为工作不得不经常乘坐飞机。在这里我想告诉你们的是：不平等的情况是可以改善的，不安全性是可以控制的。 我们必须要在21世纪努力解决20世纪那样带走许多无辜生命的政治暴力事件。我们应该记住都发生了哪些事件，在第一次世界大战中有1200万人丧生。第二次世界大战仅某一处就有1500～2000万人丧生，600万人死于大屠杀，600万名犹太人被杀，其他国籍的人有300万人丧生。前苏联在两次世界大战期间和之后的政治大清洗中有2000万人丧生。200万人死于柬埔寨独立战争中，上百万士兵死于非洲部落战争中。还有中国“文化大革命”时期，虽然没有宣布死亡人数，但是其数量绝对惊人。我的意思是，我们真的要好好想想这个问题，除非你们期望像20世纪那样，带走许多无辜生命的政治暴力事件再次在这一代人中发生。有所不同的是这次你认为无辜受伤的人可能是你。因为世界是相互依存的，所以世界确实存在着不安全因素，但是我们对此是可以控制的。

由于气候变化，资源消耗，使得世界再也无法支撑下去了。事实上2007年到2050间，世界人口将会从65亿增长到90亿，国家更多的物质增长几乎不能解决这一问题，以现在的情况来看，我们从未注意这些，但所有这些都是客观存在的问题。因此气候变化是一个问题吗?资源消耗是一个问题吗?我着手处理的贫困及1.3亿儿童无法上学和疾病问题是问题吗?当然，这是一个问题。但我认为最重要的问题是人们看待这些问题的方式，人们看待相互关系的方式以及人们看待他们自己的方式。当今世界正遭受着政治、宗教和心理冲突等问题的洗礼，这就要求我们区分和同化与我们不同的人。他们中的每一个人，在某种程度上预先达成了一个非常简单的共识。那就是我们的差异比我们的共性要重要得多。我要强调的是特蕾萨修女受邀来过这里，波诺受邀来过这里，马丁路德·金受邀来过这里。因为毕业班的学生都相信，这些人认同我们的共性比我们的差异要重要得多。

你们的精神也感染了我今天的情绪，在座的各位拥有哈佛学位，聪明的才智，这些实际上都给你们增添了无限的优势。你们必须决定如何看待这些优势并就你这一生中该做什么做切实的打算。我希望你们能分享马丁路德·金的梦想，拥护曼德拉的和解精神，支持波诺关注穷人生活，并且跟随特蕾萨修女的一生做一些积极的公益事业。与以往任何时候相比，现在的普通群众更积极地参与公益活动，这都是因为非政府组织的兴起，全球媒体文化的宣传和互联网的盛行。互联网给人们提供便利，使人们适当地行使他们的权利以改变整个世界，前提是他们都愿意行使他们的权利。当前任总统布什和我被要求处理海啸事务时，在我们处理卡特里娜海啸工作之前，美国人民已经捐助了12亿美元用于海啸救援工作，虽然许多美国人甚至不能在地图上找到马尔地夫群岛或斯里兰卡半岛。30%的美国家庭参与了捐助活动。他们当中的一半是通过互联网捐助的，这就是说，如果有足够多的人都来支持你，那么你甚至不需要太富有就可以改变这个世界了。但是我们必须要这样做，公民服务在我们国家是一种传统，这种传统和哈佛大学一样古老，当然要比我们的政府古老得多。

早在宪法生效前40年，本杰明·富兰克林就在费城组织了第一个志愿消防队。当托克维尔(法国人)1835年来这里时，他在讨论其他事情过程中流露道：让他感到惊奇的是，美国人总是愿意自己加快步伐去做事，而不是等其他人来做。现在美国有1,010,000个非政府组织。大约355,000个宗教团体，这些组织中的大部分人都从事某些工作来帮助他人。印度注册了100万个这样的组织，其中有50万个正在积极地投入工作。中国注册了280,000个这种组织，两倍之多的组织还没有注册，因为他们不想工作起来受限制。俄罗斯有400,000个这种组织，数目是如此之多，以至于普京总统曾试图要限制它们的数量。我希望他不要那样做，但这确实是一个高级的难题。在我1993年当选为总统时，俄罗斯或者是中国都没有非政府组织。全世界人们都知道他们能做一些事情去改变世界。但是我想对你们所有人再次重申，如果我们面前没有挑战，在未来的50年也没有什么东西去妨碍你们的子孙来到这个美丽的地球，这种情况比持续贬低我们共有生活的意义，以及削弱我们解决共有问题的意识和解决情感上的分歧所造成的影响要深远得多。因为在这里我们达成的简单共识是，我们的差异比我们的共性更为重要。

当我们进行人类基因组排序时，作为一个非科学家，我觉得最有意思的事情是，在我当总统的最后一年我们完成了它。我开始真的密切关注这件事，并且一直投入大量资金。我觉得最有趣的事情是，我们发现有着30亿个基因的人类，其基因99.9%是相似的。因此如果你现在看看这巨大的人海，戴着军帽的，戴着棒球帽的，戴着牛仔帽的和戴着头巾的，如果你再看看他们所有人的肤色，他们的身高，他们的胖瘦等等，所有这一切的不同，仅仅源于0.1%的基因组成。你会发现令人震惊的不仅仅是人，还有我们之中剩余的其他人，花费生命中90%的时间去思考那0.1%的差异，这难道不好笑吗?我的意思是，难道我们不都是这样的吗?在演讲中有多少逗笑的话是关于这些的?至少我没去耶鲁，不是吗?布朗袋总是很滑稽的。

那是完全一样的道理，不是吗?我是说，拥有智慧的前提是，我们一生中真正重要的是能区别对待生活中的人和事。的确，那是现代文化最原始要素之一。也是所有访谈节目，甚至许多肤浅评价的政治新闻的最原始要素之一。他们试图在人们生活中最坏的时段去抨击他们，但谈到我时就全都是好的，不管我做错了什么都不是我的错。邀请马丁路德·金，特蕾莎修女和波诺来这里也是如此。纳尔逊·曼德拉是世界上最受人们钦佩的人。不久前的一天晚上我被逗乐了，我与一群朋友正准备离开纽约的一家餐厅，这时看到距离两张桌子处坐着林博，他说过一些让我恼火的事。因此我走过去和他握手，跟他和他的客人问好，其实我过去只想告诉他，我们99.9%都是相同的。但是我不想毁了这个可怜之人的甜点，所以最后我释怀了什么也没说。

现下我们觉得这很好笑，但下个月我就要进行每年一次的非洲之行了。看看艾滋病项目进行得如何，并且与纳尔逊·曼德拉庆祝他89岁生日，不知道他还剩下多少日子。想到我可能有99.9%与他相同时，我甚至无法想象。因此我问你们，我们有诸多如此类似的其他问题吗?达尔福尔地区发生的是一场悲剧吗?我希望美国采用明智的气候变化调控制度吗?对于政府的理论家修改科学报告，我表示厌恶吗?对于正在进行的上千件事情，我持反对意见吗?当然。所有这些都源于我们能违反学习，知识、理智、甚至人性的基本标准，因为人与人之间的差异更为重要，这也促使大家崇拜权力的强度要远远高于坚持自己的理想。人与人之间的差异更为重要。近几年发生的最伟大的事就是与前任布什总统一起做这项工作。大家知道，我应该做这件事情。我身体健康，思想还跟得上时代。老布什都82岁了，仍然坐飞机飞来飞去做着同样的事情，我喜欢这个人。对于观众里的的民主党人士，我深表歉意。生活就是每天遇见新鲜的事。接下来，我想讲两个故事来结束这次演讲，故事一个发生在亚洲，一个发生在非洲。我要说所有的细节都没有这两个故事来的重要。

乔治·布什和我经历海啸事件之后，我们进行了救灾工作。地震过后科菲·安南邀请布什督导联合国在巴基斯坦的救援工作，这项工作现在得到了大家的认可，并邀请我担任了两年的海啸救助协调员。因此我的倒数第二次旅行去了印度尼西亚的亚齐市，亚齐是目前为止受灾最严重的地区，那里有25万人遇难。我去了一所难民营，那里非常热，但几千人仍生活在帐篷里，非常地不舒服。而我的工作就是去那里听他们诉苦，然后想出解决办法，怎样才能更快地使他们离开难民营。因此每个难民营都选举了一位负责人。我到达时，当地人向我介绍了一位年轻的翻译(一名年轻的印度尼西亚妇女)，难民营的负责人以及他的妻子和儿子。他们笑着向我问好，我低头看着这个小男孩，非常惊讶，几乎无法呼吸，我认为他是我所见过最漂亮的小孩。我对翻译说，我觉得他是我一生中见过最漂亮的小男孩。翻译说，是的，他确实很漂亮。海啸前他有九个漂亮的兄弟姐妹，但现在全都没了。

因此那个负责人的妻子和儿子借口离开了，由这位已经失去了九个孩子的父亲继续带着我参观了两个小时。他脸上带着微笑，所谈的都是灾民们的需求，自始至终没有提及发生在他自己身上的事以及他所承受的悲痛。最后我们到了门诊部，我抬头看到他的妻子在那里，这位有十个孩子却失去九个的母亲抱着一个小婴儿，这个婴儿出生不到一周，是救灾营里的新生儿。她说，告诉你这些我会有麻烦的，因为在印度尼西亚文化中，妇女生了小孩要在床上躺40天，家人在床边侍候，她们躺着什么也不用做。到第40天时，孩子的母亲起床回去工作，家人给婴儿取名。这个孩子出生还不到一周，因此这位失去九个孩子的母亲抱着孩子来到这里，她告诉我说，他是我们这里的新生儿，是个小男孩，我们想让你给他取个名字。我看着她对翻译说，你们有标志着新开始的名字吗?翻译解释给妇女听，妇女回答后，翻译告诉我有。很幸运在印度尼西亚语中，黎明是男孩的名字。而且孩子的母亲同意给他取名黎明，标志他们新的开始。你们不必非要接触到那些失去了十个孩子中的九个，珍爱剩下的那一个的人，以及给新生儿取名黎明这样的人后，才意识到我们的共同点比分歧更为重要。

故事就说到这里，留给大家一些时间好好思考。1968年马丁路德·金被邀请到这里时，整个国家仍笼罩着种族歧视。十年后又笼罩着性别歧视，之后又是恐同性恋症。偶尔这些丑陋的东西又会重新流行起来，但总的说来，在场的没人准备一生被这些东西束缚着，但也没人能幸免，我们都面临着诱惑。你们面临的最大诱惑是要相信自己是与众不同的，相信是你的与众不同使自己来到这里，相信你的与众不同能给自己带来巨大的财富或满足你的任何需求，而且认为这千分之一的差别是你们自己的全部，决定着你们应该有一个好的命运，别人应该有差的命运。你们一定不要落入这个陷阱。沃伦·巴菲特计划捐出99%的财富，因为他说他赚的钱大多数是因为他的出生地和出生时间，是一场幸运的意外。而且在这个时代这个地方，他的工作甚至比教师﹑警官﹑护士﹑医生和那些关心所有应该受到关爱之人的人们的工作更加赚钱。巴菲特计划捐出99%的财富，而剩下不到1%的财富也足够他这辈子花的，因为他意识到他的财富不全源自于这千分之一的差别，是人性让他捐出99%的财富给那些更需要钱的人。

我曾在非洲中部的高地工作过，那里几乎没有交通工具，人们走路碰见时会说你好﹗你好吗?早上好﹗对方的回答并不是我很好，你呢?回答译成英语是：我看见你了。想想这句话，我们每天碰见多少以前从没见过的人?待会我们全部都退场了，有人会进来折叠大约两万把椅子，然后清理我们离开时留下的垃圾，为明天或后天做准备。我们不用考虑这些，因为有人会处理的。这些清洁人员大多数都认为没人留意他们。要不是发生了可怕的灾难，我也绝不可能见到印度尼西亚亚齐的人们。故事就讲到这里，留给你们一些时间好好思考吧。请用心感受伟人演讲的真谛，请花尽可能多的时间﹑感情和精力考虑那99.9%的相同之处。关注每个人，要知道每个人都需要新的开始。享受好的命运，喜爱你的与众不同，但是要认识到我们的共性更为重要。上帝保佑你们﹗祝你们好运﹗