Activist Tells Students History is in Their Hands : Spotlight on Simmons : Simmons College

Dr. Schulz will spend some time this academic year as a Simmons College Presidential Fellow, assisting the College in exploring how to enhance its historic mission in human rights and social justice around the world.

Below is a portion of his remarks at the September 19 Simmons College convocation address:

Thank you, President Scrimshaw, for your kind introduction.

Many years ago the Japanese feminist, Keiko Higuchi, observed that in Japanese society men seem incapable of locating their underpants. Every morning, Higuchi explained, a Japanese man asks his wife, "Where are my underpants?" and every morning she finds them for him...in the same drawer where they have always been. Perhaps, Higuchi speculated, if one morning, in concert, all Japanese women were to answer, "I don't know," the entire Japanese system of government and economics would fall because men could not get dressed in the morning and therefore could not go to work and function. And she suggested that perhaps a bloodless world revolution might be accomplished in a single day if women all over the world were to respond in unison one morning to the Great Underpants Question with the simple but radical phrase, "I'm sorry, darling. I just don't know."

Well, you whom we honor here today and you who have just entered this fine school all know that Simmons College has decided to take a somewhat different approach to the revolution. In the first place of course far more women today are in the business of government or finance than was the case twenty years ago when Higuchi made her observation. And in the second place it is by now a widely accepted truism that the empowerment of women is the best gauge we have to measure a society's health and development. So by its very being and mission Simmons College is changing the world one person at a time.

But Simmons is doing more than that. It is creating an institution that is hospitable to diversity, committed to community service and conscious of itself as a participant in a global network not just of electronic connections but of interpersonal consequences in which our actions here can radically affect the lives of a woman in Afghanistan, a refugee in Sudan, a family in Iraq.

I heard a lovely little story not too long ago about a mother cat and her three kittens who were walking down the street when a large and vicious dog came up. Naturally the kittens were frightened but the mother cat just arched her back and hissed at the dog, "Bow wow! Bow wow!" and the dog, frightened, turned and ran away. The kittens were much impressed and they looked up at their mother and she looked down at them and, raising one paw, she said to them, "You see, my darlings, that's the advantage of knowing a second language." But how many Americans, either literally or metaphorically, know a second language, take responsibility for the impact of their lives upon the fortunes of the globe, live gladly in the world at large and not just in a narrow corner of it? Simmons seeks to endow its students with exactly that kind of global consciousness.

And one of the features of such a consciousness is a recognition that the denial of anyone's human rights anywhere in the world can have a profound impact on our own. When the rule of law and the investigatory power of a free press are stifled in China, to take but one example, lead seeps into toys that in turn reach the mouths of our children.

It will be my honor this year to help Simmons College decide how it wishes to lift up its longstanding commitment to building a world in which everybody's rights are respected. I don't know yet exactly what shape that newly energized commitment will take—whether in changes in curriculum, in an expansion of student opportunities for service, in the creation of a human rights institute, in more support for researchers in the field or in none of the above, all of the above or something entirely different—but I do know that, whatever form it takes, it will be built upon three fundamental principles that are under major threat today, three principles that under gird the struggle for human rights no matter what its venue and three principles adherence to which will help save the world....One of those values is the conviction that truth takes a myriad of forms, that no one person or government or religion or tribal chieftain has a monopoly on truth, that revelation is not sealed and that there is no necessary correlation between wisdom and power....

But though truth takes a myriad of forms, there is one truth that remains beyond dispute and that is that all blood flows red, that more profound than all our differences is our common suffering and that what will save us and save our planet is a recognition of the frailty we share. That truth is under threat today from the enemies of democracy and the champions of it; from the purveyors of morality and the disdainers of it. But it is still true.

I know no better example of the embrace of frailty than a little story told by Richard Selzer, a medical doctor, a surgeon.

"I stand by the bed where a young woman lies. Her mouth is twisted in palsy. In order to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had had to cut the little nerve.

"Her young husband is in the room and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private.

"All at once the young woman speaks, 'Will my mouth always be like this?' she asks. 'Yes,' I say, 'It will. It is because the nerve was cut.' She nods and is silent but the young man speaks. 'I like it,' he says. 'It is kind of cute.'

"Unmindful of me, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close to them I see how he twists his own mouth to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works. I remember that the gods appeared in ancient Greece as mortals and I pause to let the wonder in."

To see beyond appearances, beyond pretense and stereotype, beyond bombast and bravado, beyond the crooked mouth and the severed limb, right into the authentic heart of misery, into the common bonds of suffering—the remarkable capacity that we human beings occasionally display to identify with another's pain, despite all of our brutality, to exercise a moral imagination, despite all of our pettiness—it is that upon which human rights are based and the salvation of the world depends.

In the midst of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, a group of machete-wielding militiamen attacked a girl's school in the middle of the night. The teenagers were rousted from their beds about 2:00 AM and forced to line up in the dining hall. They were ordered to separate themselves, Hutu from Tutsi, so that only the Tutsi would die. But the girls refused. A second time the commander ordered them to divide up by ethnic group. But still they refused. And finally one of the girls found her voice and, though very frightened, this is what it was reported later that she said: "We cannot separate ourselves, you see, because we are not Hutu; we are not Tutsi; we are Rwandan" at which point every one of them was slaughtered.

But what a legacy they leave! "We are not Hutu; we are not Tutsi. We are Rwandan." In that simple sentiment that young girl bespoke a graciousness upon which depends the salvation of the world. In a magnificent essay entitled "The Moral Necessity of Metaphor," the novelist Cynthia Ozick says "those who have no pain can imagine what it is to suffer. Those at the center can imagine what it is to be outside. The strong can imagine what it is to be weak....And we strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of [other] strangers."

I have never been tortured nor had my arm amputated but I know of plenty of people who have and I am compelled to make a metaphorical leap from my own trivial sufferings into those of the hearts of strangers. And what I find there is astonishing: what I find is familiarity. Familiar hearts. Of every stranger. Foe or friend. Ally or adversary. Just a moment's recognition of that phenomenon and Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo Bay would be merely names on a map and not markers of the eternal shame of all Americans. The second way Simmons can help save the world is by never failing to remind us of our common frailties.

And then there is a final principle this College seeks to propagate and that is the conviction that history is not finished; that the future is not fated; and that with our privilege, with our degrees, comes our responsibility to build a more benevolent nation, a more hospitable people, a more welcoming world.

Somewhere in one of the great art museums in Europe hangs a large painting of Faust and the Devil sitting at a chess table. Faust has made his pact with the Devil and now his face is contorted in anguish because he retains on the chessboard but a knight and a King and the King is in check.

One day a great chess master happened into the museum and naturally this painting eye caught his eye and he sat down in front of it and stared. Fifteen minutes passed. Then twenty. And still the master stared. And then suddenly, leaping to his feet: "It's a lie!" he shouted at the top of his lungs for all to hear. "It's a lie, I tell you. The King and the knight—they have another move. They have another move."

And that, my friends, is the final way Simmons College can help save the world—by insisting that, no matter what orthodoxy may claim or ideology may bluster, history is not finished, the future is not fated, what comes next is in our hands, so that in the face of hardship and injustice, of suffering and of death, we say, "The story is not over. The end is not here yet. For it is not just the King but the knight, not just the Queen but the rook, not just the Bishop but pawn, not just the wealthy but the pauper, not just the powerful but every starving, lonely, frightened person in the world, every single person, every single one of us, who has another move. We all have another move....

We are engaged today in an enormous struggle for the soul of this country. It is a struggle between those who would close down culture and those who would keep it open. Between those who welcome the preeminence of one nation and those who give their fealty to the common interests of the globe. It is, in short, a struggle between those with a parched vision and those with a generous heart. This institution is committed to one side of that equation and, to you whom we honor today and to you whom we welcome, I have a very simple message: you are part of an institution which with your help can quite literally save the world so wear the mantle of its values proudly; give no quarter; fear no shadows; and you will make the mountains tremble.

» Activist Tells Students History is in Their Hands

Activist Tells Students History is in Their Hands

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