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Commencement Address at Beloit College Trustees, President Ferrall, faculty, students, and, most importantly, my family, Bob Kettlewell, Maddy, and Sam Kettlewell. Thank you so very much for supporting me with this great recognition today. This is an incredibly emotional experience for me. Twenty-five years ago I sat where you are and walked up the stairs to receive my Beloit degree. Today I am so proud to roll up the ramp that you have installed to make this campus a more accessible place for future generations. However, never in my wildest imagination could I have predicted that I would be sitting here today addressing you. I was a product of the Vietnam War era: sex, drugs, rock and roll, and questioning authority. Those were the traits of my student body. We were wild children in the true sense of the word. I set off from here, as many of you will be, on an uncertain path to pursue a career in nurse midwifery. And, I got partway there when abruptly, like that, life threw me the proverbial curve ball. I dove into Lake Michigan to retrieve a pair of shoes that my friend's dog knocked in, and when I hit bottom, my life was different forever. I was paralyzed; temporarily slowed down, and face to face with my own finiteness and powerlessness. However, it didn't stay that way for long. I found personal power through others who had crossed that bridge before me, other people with disabilities who taught me the power of accepting who I was and using my newly changed self to change the world around me. People like Ed Roberts, a quadriplegic , in California, who had been told he couldn't go to college, not because of anything innately wrong with him, but because the campus was not accessible. Ed went to that college and was later told he couldn't live with the other students, again, not because of anything innately related to Ed, but because the campus dormitories were not accessible. They made him live in the infirmary. Ed said, "No. I don't want to live in the infirmary. I am not sick." And he began this revolution of empowerment that has changed not only this country but countries all around the world. People like Judy who didn't go to school even at the elementary school level, because she had a disability, and the school told her she would be an insurance risk. People like Evan who graduated magna cum laude from his law school class but couldn't get even a job interview, because he was a person with a disability. Ed went on to run the first state vocational rehabilitation program in the country as a person with a disability, despite having been told by that very agency that he was too severely disabled to work. Judy now sits as assistant secretary of the Department of Education, heading up special education for all the schools in the country like the ones that had previously told her she could not attend them. And Evan, who passed away recently, went on to chair the EEOC where he made it his life's cause to prevent discrimination against people like him. These people taught me that the world looked at us wrong, and that we had a responsibility to help the world see through our eyes. A young girl came to my office in Chicago one day and said to me, "Before I met you and before I came to Access Living, I thought my wheelchair was too wide for the bathroom doors. Now, I know the bathroom doors are too narrow for my wheelchair." It is that paradigm shift, that change in world view, that gave the disability-rights community its power. And what does this all have to do with you? I guess I would not have been invited here to speak to you if people here did not want to hear about my disability experience. But, what I want to speak to you about now is the lessons that I've learned. First: the power of one. One person, truly one person--in my case Ed Roberts--changed my world forever. I knew Ed. When he was 11 and faced with the prospect of dying, Ed didn't believe he was going to change the world, but he did. Each ending is, in fact, a new beginning. And through finding Ed's personal power, he recognized his connectedness to others and brought the rest of us along with him. Second: the only thing predictable in your future is the unpredictability of it. You may sit here now with the best laid plans of where you want to go, and life may throw you a curve ball, and what will you do with it? I hope that what you will do with it is look inside that experience and recognize that sometimes detours can take you to your true path; that in fact they are not detours, but rather they are the path you were meant to be on in the first place. Never let anyone deny you the dignity of risk. People like myself have been paternalised and protected for way too long, and I hope that we can teach others, when they are faced with fear, to walk through that fear, to accept that challenge, because it is in that process that true greatness is found. Third: persevere at all costs. When we are challenged with a major policy issue, and people tell us it cannot be done, such as passing the Americans with Disabilities Act, we know something they don't know, and that is we will not go away. We have a new world view, and it is our business to take that world view to all of you. Finally, recognize your connectedness to your fellow man. Bring a sense of morality and rightness and deep-seeded conviction to your community, and you will move mountains. The next millennium is filled with contradictions. This new information age has brought in so many contradictions that, as you go out into it, I'm sure you will be challenged by it. First, technology has brought us so much closer, and yet, in some ways, so much farther apart. It has placed things that previously took weeks, months, years, or decades, at our fingertips in minutes. The globalization of the world, on the one hand, has brought us together with people from all over the world, and yet we look at people in Kosovo killing their neighbors. The world has shrunk in some regards but grown much wider in many others. This is the best economy in our lifetime many say, and yet 40 million or more Americans are uninsured for healthcare. Hunger in America is on the increase. Crime is going down, and yet our kids are killing each other. We live in, perhaps, the most diverse country in the world; our workplaces have become integrated and yet hate crimes are on the rise. Science and technology have allowed us to sustain life better than ever, but that same technology is being used to end life by "heroizing" people like Jack Kevorkian. Ethics have become increasingly a force in the fields of medicine, and the academy. Yet, Princeton University, on whose campus I joined students in protest last month, hires a so-called ethicist, Dr. Peter Singer, who advocates the killing of disabled infants as somehow moral and ethical. You are entering this world of contradictions. How will you manage it? This is your challenge. To claim your personal power, you will break the bonds of selfishness, embracing the commonality in pursuit of a higher ground for all. You must bring that strong sense of morality and ethics with you, for not just your generation but for the generations to come. One of my heroes, Deval Patrick, former assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice, said:
You, each of you, has the power to change the world. Godspeed, and go get 'em. HOME | FAQs | NEWSROOM | SITE MAP | FEDERAL AGENCIES | RESOURCES |
