Last week, I went to hear President Bill Clinton give the spring commencement addess at Ohio State University. My boyfriend, Mike, and I saw some ONE t-shirts and wristbands throughout the crowd and our friend and fellow ONE member, Cheryl Johncox, wore a lovely ONE.org on her graduation cap. We were crossing our fingers that the commencement speech might mention some of ONE’s issues – well, I think President
Clinton mentioned them all. Now it’s up to us to do something about it. With the launch of ONE Vote ‘08, we can put aside our differences and focus on our “common humanity” as President Clinton would say.

Below are some excerpts of what he had to say:

“I could talk to you all day about what needs to be done. Is Darfur a travesty? Yes. Does it still bother me that we still after three years of intense effort don’t give medicine to all poor people in the world that need it to deal with AIDS, TB, Malaria and infections related to dirty water? (They claim one-fourth of all the lives on Earth every year.) Yeah, that bothers me. But all these problems are rooted in one larger question, and the answer to that question will determine whether your children and your grandchildren will be able to come here 25 or 50 years hence in an increasingly interdependent, crowded, clashing world.

The question is which matters more: our interesting differences or our common humanity, and what are you supposed to do about it?”

“We have to see each other because in an interdependent world, we really can’t succeed without each other. That will be your great challenge. All other things will be dealt with if we think and feel and act as if our common future is our common future.”

You can listen to the full audio of his address here.