ENGLISH SPEECH BILL CLINTON Were Bound English Subtitles

You are graduating in the most 
interdependent age in human history.  

Interdependent with each other, within your 
community, your state, your nation and the world.  

This campus has seen global imagination,  

and what you have all said today, “light 
the world on fire,” both have to be defined,  

because all interdependence means 
is that here we are, stuck together.  

We can’t get away from each other.  

Divorce, walls, borders, you name it, 
we’re still stuck with our interdependence.

Whether we like it or not, for the rest 
of your lives, what happens to you will,  

in some measure, be determined by what happens 
to other people, by how you react to it,  

how they treat you, how you treat them, and 
what larger forces are at work in the world.  

The global economy, the internet, mobile 
technology, the explosion of the social media  

have unleashed both positive and negative forces. 
The last few years have seen an amazing explosion  

of economic, social and political 
empowerment. They have, also, laid bare  

the power of persistent inequalities, political 
and social instability, and identity politics  

based on the simple proposition that 
our differences are all that matter.

At the root of it all is a simple profound 
question: Will you define yourselves  

and your relationship to others  

in positive or negative terms? Because 
if we’re bound to share the future,  

it seems to me that it is clear that all of 
us have a responsibility, each in our own way,  

to build up the positive and to reduce the 
negative forces of our interdependence.  

This applies to people on the left, the right, 
somewhere in the middle or somewhere out there.  

There are so many people who feel that they’re 
losing out in the modern world, because people  

either don’t see they more, they see them only as 
members of groups that they feel threatened by.

The young people pushing for immigration reform, 
clinging to DACA and DAPA, hoping to make their  

way in a country where their future is uncertain, 
feel that way. The young people in the Black Lives  

Matter movement feel that way. But so do the coal 
miners in communities where their present is bleak  

and they think their future is bleaker, and they 
think all of us who want to fight climate change  

don’t give a rip about the wreckage of their 
lives. It’s everywhere. When we try to drift apart  

in an interdependent age, all we do  

is build up the negative and reduce 
the positive forces of interdependence.

What does set the world on fire mean anyway?  

It means you can set the world on 
fire by the power of your imagination,  

by the gift of your passion, by the 
devotion of your heart and your skills  

to make your life richer and to lift others; 
or it means you can set the world on fire.  

You have to decide, but because the world 
is interdependent, you can’t take a pass.

I think the future begins by accepting the 
wonderful instruction of our very first  

Jesuit pope. Pope Francis has 
fostered a culture of encounter.  

Where my foundation works in Africa and the hills 
of central Africa, nobody’s got any kind of wheel  

transportation, so everybody meets each other on 
foot, and when people pass each other on path and  

one says, “Good morning. Hello. How are you?” the 
response translated into English is, “I see you.  

I encounter you. You are real to me.”

Think about all the people today, yesterday 
and tomorrow, you will pass and not see.  

Do you really see everybody who works 
in a restaurant where you’ll go after  

here to have a celebratory meal? Do we 
see people that we pass on the street,  

who may have a smile or a frown, or 
a burden they can barely carry alone?  

When we passionately advocate 
for the causes, we believe in,  

have we anticipated all the unanticipated 
consequences so that we can take everybody along  

for a ride to the future we imagine.

When Pope Francis tells us to 
engage in a culture of encounter,  

he’s thinking about the LMU students 
in this class who since they were  

freshman have performed almost 200,000 
hours of community service. Thank you.  

That’s a fancy elevated way of saying you 
saw a need, and you stepped in to solve it,  

and you did it, not only because it was 
the morally right thing for other people,  

but because it made your life more meaningful. 
That’s the way you want to set the world on fire.

The young people that were mentioned in 
my introduction who have been part of our  

global initiative community for university 
students made very specific commitments.  

They promised to mentor high school girls to 
help them overcome any preconceived notions  

of their own limitations. They promised 
to help the victims of domestic violence  

and violence against the homeless. They promised 
to provide more capital to small businesspeople in  

Haiti through micro-credit loans, something 
that means a lot to Hillary and me personally,  

because for more than 40 years since 
we took a honeymoon trip there,  

we’ve cared about them and believed in them. They 
promised an educational exchange with the National  

University of Rwanda. We 
can learn a lot from them,  

because they lost 10 percent of their 
people in ninety days to a genocide in 1994,  

and they came back because they refused to 
be paralyzed by the past. They joined hands  

across the land that led to all that 
bloodshed to create a common future.

That’s what’s at the heart of your 
restorative justice program here.  

Instead of figuring out who to punish, 
figure out how to repair the harm.  

Instead of focusing on getting even for the 
past, focus on how we can share the future.  

It’s at the heart of your efforts here 
to improve the juvenile justice system.  

You, without knowing it, have often embodied 
the future of positive interdependence  

we hope to build. You can’t have shared prosperity 
and an inclusive community unless we believe  

our common humanity is even more important 
than our incredibly interesting differences.

I will say this again. On every continent, 
think of the struggles in Latin America;  

think of the political struggles and 
social and economic struggles in America;  

think of what’s going on in Asia; think of what’s 
going on in Africa; think of how Europe is dealing  

with this influx from the Middle East of the 
largest number of refugees since World War II,  

and all the conflicts within all these countries, 
and whether they should keep Europe together.  

Every single one of these is part of an ongoing 
battle to define the terms of our interdependence.

Will we do it in positive or negative terms? 
Are we going to expand the definition of us  

and shrink the definition of them, or shall we 
just hunker down in the face of uncomfortable  

realities and just stick with our own crowd? 
It will be a bleaker future if you do that.

Set the world on fire with your 
imagination, not with your matches.  

Set the world on fire by proving 
that what we have in common  

is a million times more important than our 
admittedly utterly fascinating differences.

If every day we all get a little 
better in seeing everyone we encounter  

physically or virtually, if we 
remember that a very short life,  

the things that we share that are even more 
than the things about us that are special.

Do well. Do good. Have a good time doing it,  

and remember, it’s the journey that matters. Set 
the world on fire in the right way. God bless you.