Wellesley College released audio excerpts on Monday of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s student commencement speech from 1969, in which she says politicians of her time need to look past the “art of the possible.”
In the four minute-long clip, Clinton talked extensively about the political climate, and encouraged her audience to look toward the “art of making what appears to be impossible possible.”
Her remarks from 47 years ago stand in stark contrast to the race she’s in today, in which her Democratic supporters tend to see her as a candidate who will practice the “art of the possible,” in contrast to Bernie Sanders, who many say would have little chance of realizing many of his ideas.
Clinton was the first student to deliver a student commencement address at the school. Here’s what she said:
I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting — something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We’re not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable element of criticizing and constructive protest. Part of the problem with empathy for professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything. We’ve had lots of empathy, we’ve had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long that our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible, and the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.
The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot. Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade — years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program — so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn’t a discouraging gap and it didn’t turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap. What we did is often difficult for some people to understand. They ask us quite often: “Why, if you’re dissatisfied, do you stay in a place?” Well, if you didn’t care a lot about it you wouldn’t stay. It’s almost as though my mother used to say, “You know I’ll always love you but there are times when I certainly won’t like you.” Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education.
But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves.
The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word consequences of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to a woman who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn’t want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she’s afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don’t have time for it. Not now.
