Let me ask you a question.
Who is your inspiration?
My step daughter Lisa sits on my lap as I am doing homework at 9 pm at night and asks me why are you still going to school?
I smile and kiss her forehead. She is not old enough to understand why I am so tired all the time, trying to juggle college with all of my other roles including father, small business owner, family man, caretaker, lover friend.
Who is your inspiration?
My parents fled to this country as holocaust survivors, just teenagers themselves and survived a new country, a new language, religious intolerance, and dedicated their lives to helping those less fortunate. They taught my brother, sister and myself to help make all people understand those first words written so eloquently by Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence "…that all men (and women) are created equal.."
In 1968, my parents voluntarily bussed me across town to a school where I was one of six white children. My best friend was the only Hispanic student. We both learned that year that no matter what the color of your skin, or where you lived, or what name your God had-- all of us are first and foremost human beings.
Who inspires you?
A friend of mine invented a very simple water pump for third world countries, where people live on less than a dollar a day. His pump enables them to grow more produce in the off season, sell their excess in the market place, and make an extra $250 in the first year alone. Imagine what this little $12 pump has done. Imagine what we as world still can do to fight poverty and other atrocities. Look at the genocide in the Sudan. The longing for an independent Tibet. The homeless on our own city streets.
Who inspires you? I still remember as a nine year old boy hearing those words of Neil Armstrong as he first stepped onto the moon and said "that's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." All that summer I sat on my roof at night and gazed through my homemade telescope at the moon and the stars, dreaming of far off distant worlds that one day during my lifetime man might journey to. Wow. The possibilities are endless.
Who inspires me?
You who sit before me at this graduation ceremony. Professors, students, and staff alike, who smile at me or say hello, unlike a larger university where I would be only a number.
I have met returning vets from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are trying to rebuild their lives. Foreign students from as far away as the Sudan, Egypt, and Japan . Mothers, fathers, recent high school graduates, so many others who have started their college education right here at ACC.
Where will our dreams take us?
I have stood high on a temple in the last great city of the Maya, deep in the
jungle of Guatemala on a full moon night listening to the howler monkeys in
the jungle canopy below.
I have climbed alongside Llamas to the lost Incan city of Machu Pichu high in
the Andes.
I have wondered countless hours at the best of man's achievements in the Louvre
and the British museum.
I have skied across frozen oceans in the Antarctic and lived on or near both
the North and South Pole.
I have stood in such beauty that I have finally embraced the idea that there
might be something, some greater force than us all.
Yet all of this travelling took me further and further from home.
What was I looking for?
Was I searching for paradise, nirvana, or the fabled city of Shangri-la?
No, I was looking for further inspiration And found it right here at ACC.
I congratulate all of you for your successes here and hope that each of you
will continue on your own quest. The distant world that we all have dreamed
of is right here. Can you see it? Congratulations and thank you.