I’ve had a chance to talk with a number of students and faculty from Bates and been amazingly impressed by this place and its long commitment to engage in the hard issues that we must tackle. For those of you who have just come to Bates, it’s got to seem overwhelming. You’re in a new geographic location, making new friends, living in a new place. You’re still trying to navigate the library, the cafeteria — it’s a lot that’s descended on you. You will soon get used to it; it will become a home. This is a place where you will ask many questions, and get asked many questions, about issues that make us think. It is also a place that will support you through that questioning. That’s an important point to know when it seems overwhelming. . . .

The news is ugly and overwhelming. You read, ‘Seven U.S. troops dead in Iraq.’ About global warming and extreme weather events. There is a tendency to feel overwhelmed. The economy is up and down, and uncertain. They’re outsourcing jobs halfway around the world. You must be wondering, How will I get through? How will I pay off my student loans? Will there be a job for me? These are large issues that can seem daunting. The challenge is to find ways to have a voice. . . .

Take Maine and its campaign-finance reform. I talk about this reform in the rest of the country and they say it’s impossible, they feel they’re destined to be run by the Enrons and Halliburtons of the world. I tell them, look at Maine. They’ve managed to change. Maine also now offers health-care insurance for everyone. Part of the definition of tackling large issues is trying to think beyond the bounds of what we’re told is achievable and what isn’t. A minister has said, “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and watching the evidence change.” . . .

As a student, you feel uncertain. But what we don’t recognize is that everybody who acts is uncertain. You never proceed with absolute knowledge. We think that Rosa Parks came out of nowhere and single-handedly, acting alone, launched the civil rights movement. None of that is true. She was laboring hard and in the trenches for 12 years. She was the secretary of the NAACP local. The TV cameras don’t zoom in on someone taking notes at an NAACP meeting. But that was just as much a part of what happened in history as that day on the bus. That moment on the bus was pivotal in U.S. history, but if you go back, was it more so than that first NAACP meeting she went to? Was it more so than all the times she hung in there with doubts? All those events are interconnected.

If she had given up in year three, or five, or seven or 10, we never would have heard of Parks. If Rosa Parks had given up because things were hard, history might have been different. And when someone acts, they act by joining together with others. The process of making change is about bringing new people in. One of the exciting things about being at a school like this, with a long tradition of involvement, is that you have a chance to enter that tradition. The historian Vincent Harding calls it a river, a river of people working for social justice. It extends thousands of years, extending forward into the future. We can all be part of that.

I see the banner for Wesleyan at the back of this gym [among a group of banners representing NESCAC colleges]. A young woman registered 300 voters at Wesleyan a few years ago and her congressman won by 27 votes. She said, “I guess I made a difference.” I said, “I know you did.” You never know how an action is going to play out in the world.

Often, we’re told that our efforts can’t matter; we’re condescended to. People are cynical. There was a rock band called Plastic People of the Universe in the Czech Republic, influenced by groups like the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa. The authorities did not like their music; they said it was “morbid” and “not socially constructive.” (Perhaps you’ve heard that at some point about some music you like or play.) They played anyway, in underground raves, in a warehouse, that police would break up. Then they were jailed. Vaclav Havel was a few years older and a few years more respectable. He formed a defense committee, and the authorities prosecuted the defense committee; that’s what dictatorships do. Havel tried to circulate a petition to get these people out of jail, and he was being mocked, even by people who said they didn’t like the regime. People said the defense committee and others were exhibitionists, indulgent, just trying to get attention. They asked why they didn’t quietly work behind the scenes. I’ve heard those same phrases levied against students trying to make a difference: “Oh, you’re just trying to get attention. You don’t even know what you’re doing.” There’s always a standard — I call it the “perfect standard” in Soul of a Citizen — that you can levy at someone: “You’re doing it in the wrong way. You don’t know enough. You’re not eloquent enough. Give up. Don’t even begin.” Havel, looking back several years later, noted that his efforts did not free a single political prisoner. On some levels, the critics were right. On another level, they were wrong, because when those people got out of jail, they said the efforts of Havel and others gave their sacrifices meaning, allowed them to act. Those people who signed those petitions took a first step to challenge the regime. Several years later, they were playing dissident music, putting on dissident theater, preaching sermons. They were challenging this regime that, wrote Havel, would not long stand, and he was right. We don’t always know the impacts of our efforts. The courage of ordinary people, who recognize that bringing somebody new into involvement, is just as important as the particular fight on a particular issue.

The hardest conversation to start about an important issue may be the first one, because we aren’t used to it. People are not always going to agree with you. They will have different viewpoints. Listen to them, hear them out. Try to understand how someone came by those views. Whatever view you have, it will serve you immensely. Sometimes people say, when I caution them not to get caught in the perfect standard, “Suppose you take a wrong stand on an issue. What do you do? What if you make matters worse?” The first stand I ever took was on Vietnam and I supported the war. I discovered I’d been lied to, so I ended up opposing it. How do I frame that first stand? I frame it as a learning process, a process that got me engaged so I could ask further questions, learn more, and change my position. If we do that with people who disagree with us, it’s immensely valuable whether or not we change their minds; we see how their world view develops.

What terrifies me is the ethic of bullying from Washington, D.C. A friend is a colonel in the military who said after 9/11, “They want us to shut up and color, like we’re 8-year-olds.” Or John Ashcroft saying, if you’re against us you’re an ally of terrorism. Or Cheney saying that if the terrorists attack, the Democrats will have invited them. Or they run an ad against Tim Johnson, Democratic senator from South Dakota, the only one in Congress whose son is actually serving with our forces: Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan — the hardest places. They had the gall to call him unpatriotic. We have to be able to draw a line that says, “Excuse me, patriotism is asking the hardest questions at the hardest possible time. We may disagree over the answers, but that’s part of what being a citizen in a democracy is about.” But don’t let a politician from either party tell us that we are being unpatriotic by questioning. That erodes our democracy.

I hope you will get off campus to meet people who are engaged in the hardest issues. Some are flaky, sure, and some are crazy, but most are amazingly resilient and strong and couldn’t imagine themselves doing anything else. Desmond Tutu has had a hard life. He’s spent his whole life fighting apartheid, he’s had prostate cancer. He’s seen people tortured, murdered, imprisoned. You might think he would be broken down and bitter. But he is the lightest spirit imaginable. At a benefit in Los Angeles, there was a band from East LA playing and I saw Desmond Tutu dancing, in the middle of the floor. I’d never seen a Nobel Peace Prize winner dance before; I wondered, is there a lesson here? The lesson is about being passionate about life. Here was somebody who, in addition to speaking out, was embracing the best of what life can offer. Embracing life is inseparable from speaking out against injustice in a prophetic voice.

What does a lifetime mean? What does four years at Bates mean? Or five years, 10 years, whatever. Imagine if we look back on our lives and ask what we’ve done for the common good. We could choose one path, one that’s about us and us only. We could choose another path reflecting a sort of American creed: After 9/11 someone wrote a letter to my newspaper that said, “Be patriotic. Run out and buy a sofa.” Salvation at the mall, but I’m not quite sure that’s what it’s all about. Or we could choose another path that asks, “Why am I here on this earth? What purpose do I have?” And we can answer by saying, “I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know all the questions. But I do know I am connected with my fellow human beings. I am going to explore that connection. I am going to pursue it and stand up for what I believe in. I may not always do things right, but I will act as best I can, keep on, and see what happens from there.” That, I think, is the way to live.

“Everybody who acts is uncertain,” author Paul Rogat Loeb told the Bates College community and its Class of 2008 during the Sept. 8 ceremony marking the start of the college’s 150th academic year.

But those who change the world do so despite their fear and hesitation, Loeb explained in a Convocation address extolling social and civic involvement. “Part of the definition of tackling large issues is trying to think beyond the bounds of what we’re told is achievable and what isn’t,” he said.

Known for books celebrating “the courage of ordinary people” who have committed themselves to community activism, Loeb addressed about 1,000 people in the afternoon ceremony. The crowd, gathering in Alumni Gym due to a threat of rain from the remnants of Hurricane Frances, included 476 students new to Bates — 467 first-years and nine transfers from other schools. (Read more about the Class of 2008.)

Speakers included Dean of the Faculty Jill Reich, Acting College Chaplain Rachel Herzig, Student Government President Jamil Zraikat ’05 and Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen.

Themes of involvement, responsibility and self-fulfillment rang throughout the presentation. Zraikat, a citizen of Jordan, opened the ceremony with an Arabian parable about a local governor.

One of his subjects dreamed that the governor climbed halfway up a ladder of 1,000 rungs. When the governor learned of the dream, he rewarded the subject with 500 gold pieces.

But a greedy man heard of the reward and told the governor that, in his dream, the governor climbed all the way to the ladder’s top. The greedy man’s reward was 1,000 lashes — because, the governor said, “you got me to the top with nowhere else to go.”

Asking the new students not to take for granted the people they encounter every day, including the Dining Services staff who fix their meals and the custodians who tend their dorms, Zraikat cited the Bates tradition of enthusiasm, loyalty and mutual support. At Bates, he said, “You compete in order to better yourself.”

Loeb offered a portrait gallery of individuals who have transformed their worlds: civil rights activist Rosa Parks, Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela and lesser-known individuals who have effected change on the local or regional level.

He emphasized the importance of perseverance. Parks, he said, had been a civil-rights activist for 12 years before her famous refusal to sit at the back of a bus. “If she had given up in three or five or seven or 10 years, we never would have heard of Rosa Parks,” Loeb said. “We don’t know the impact that our efforts are going to have.”

In an especially timely example during this election season, Loeb — noting the Wesleyan banner hanging among a NESCAC grouping at the back of the gym — recounted the example of a Wesleyan student who registered 300 new voters prior to election. Her congressional candidate won by 27 votes. “I guess I made a difference,” the student told Loeb.

Against the context of Maine’s national leadership in health-care and clean-elections legislation, Loeb told the Class of 2008, “You have the potential to set an example for the rest of the country.”

Loeb also deplored what he called “the ethic of bullying coming from Washington, D.C.” Citing what he views as Bush administration hostility toward questioning of its policies, he characterized the administration’s dismissive response to dissent as “shut up and color.”

“We have to be able to draw a line that says, ‘Excuse me, patriotism is asking the hardest questions at the hardest possible time.’ ”

Loeb visited Lewiston in the midst of a 20-city publicity tour for his new anthology, The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. The college chose his previous book, Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time, as its Common Reading Program title for the Class of 2008, assigning the book as summer reading and engaging the new students in discussions about it during orientation earlier this month. (Read excerpts from Loeb’s Convocation speech here, and more about Loeb here and here.)

Following Loeb at the podium, Hansen outlined four priorities facing the college this year. First was the faculty’s continuing effort to revise the General Education requirements (an effort that Hansen described, to appreciative laughter, as an “aerobic discussion of how to build academic muscles”).

The second is the campus master planning process, whose immediate focus has become improvements to student housing and to residential life, including the creation of a new dining facility. Third is the major fund-raising campaign that will be officially unveiled in October. Finally, Hansen referred again to an issue she first raised in her inaugural address, nearly two years ago: the search for ways to provide time for meaningful reflection within the pressured daily activities of the college.

For the second year tapping her own reflections during summer vacation — this year spent on the Jersey Shore against the backdrop of the media’s Summer Olympics coverage — Hansen closed her remarks with a few comparisons between the Olympics and the first-years’ likely careers at Bates.

While Olympic athletes and Bates students share the tenets of effort, commitment, creativity and achievement, Hansen said, the aim is not “the performance of a lifetime, but a lifetime of contribution.”

“Let the games of our next Bates year begin,” she concluded.

Paul Rogat Loeb, author of a highly praised book exploring community involvement, opens the 150th academic year at Bates College with the Convocation address “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Hope in a Time of Fear” at 4:10 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 8, on the main quadrangle. The rain site will be the Alumni Gymnasium.

Loeb will address a campus community of about 2,000 members, including 467 first-year students. In all, some 1,800 degree-seeking students will be enrolled on campus or in Bates-sponsored off-campus programs this fall. (Click here for more about the Class of 2008.)

Loeb’s Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time (St. Martin’s Press, 1999) examines what it takes to lead a life of social commitment. At Bates, Loeb will discuss themes from Soul — the summer Common Reading Program assignment for the class of 2008 — and from his just-released anthology, The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear (Basic Books).

For more than 30 years, Loeb has researched and written about citizen responsibility and empowerment, asking why some people choose civic activism and involvement while others abstain. He has written widely admired books, lectured to enthusiastic responses at some 300 colleges and universities, and has written for or been covered by many national and international news organizations.

Loeb has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Psychology Today, Village Voice, Utne Reader and many other publications. He has been cited in congressional debates and discussed in periodicals from The Economist to Family Circle, from Teen to Modern Maturity.

Every year, under its Common Reading Program, Bates asks its incoming first-year students to read a book to be discussed with faculty, staff and older students during the new-student orientation period.

The idea is to equip new students to begin their Bates careers with “a discussion that’s intellectual and based on a theme important to think about,” says associate dean Holly Gurney, the member of the dean of students office responsible for first-year students and for the Common Reading Program.

The Common Reading Program committee selected Soul of a Citizen, she explains, because it was considered valuable “to start entering students thinking not only about their role in the larger world, but also about how we maintain a healthy campus community, in and outside classes.”

“While this book certainly has themes very much in line with Bates’ identity,” she adds, “there were points that committee members found provocative, in a good way, about topics of great importance to campus and people in general. We want new students thinking right away about critical discourse, about getting outside their own perspective.”

With Soul of a Citizen, wrote Publishers Weekly, “Loeb offers Americans a new vision for personal engagement with societal issues. . . . [He] eloquently argues for a return to community involvement and social activism which, he says, have declined since the 1960s and 1970s. He gently chides former activists lost to private pursuits, fatigue and cynicism, and warns of increasing social isolation and the widening opportunity gap between rich and poor, despite our robust economy. Throughout, Loeb emphasizes the psychological and spiritual importance of the human connection.

Its title adapted from a lyric sung by Billie Holiday, The Impossible Will Take a Little While is Loeb’s new book. Continuing the theme of civic empowerment set forth in Soul, it combines Loeb’s essays with writings by people as diverse, effective and influential as Maya Angelou, Marian Wright Edelman, Vaclav Havel, Seamus Heaney, Tony Kushner, Jonathan Kozol, Bill McKibben, Nelson Mandela, Pablo Neruda, Desmond Tutu, Alice Walker, Cornel West, Terry Tempest Williams and Howard Zinn.

Loeb is an affiliate scholar at Seattle’s Center for Ethical Leadership. Born in California in 1952, he attended Stanford University and New York’s New School for Social Research, and worked in both places to end the Vietnam War. From 1974 through 1976, Loeb edited Liberation magazine, where he worked with writers like Grace Paley, John Berger, Jane Jacobs, Allen Ginsberg, Noam Chomsky and Gary Snyder.

His first book, Nuclear Culture (New Society Publishers, 1982), reported on the daily world of atomic weapons workers in Hanford, Wash. Hope in Hard Times (Lexington Books, 1986) examined the lives and visions of ordinary Americans involved in grassroots peace activism. Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus (Rutgers University Press, 1995) explored the values and choices of American college students.