Members of the Wheaton community, graduates of the Wheaton College Class of 1996, my congratulations and salutations. I am proud to be your commencement speaker. Your achievements are yours to cherish and ours to celebrate. I also want to congratulate your families; friends, significant others, and student loan officers. For no-one gets to graduation without a little help from a family, a friend, a significant other, or, from time to time, a student loan officer.

For the past several weeks, I have been asking myself what I could say on this extraordinary day. In such a questioning spirit, I logged onto my computer and found the Internet address for the Wheaton College Website, "http: // www.wheatonma.edu." I clicked my way to a virtual Wheaton College. Once there, I clicked "Hot Button," then "Leaf Peeping Tour," a description of a famous Wheaton event, Professor Holcombe Austin's Wheaton Tree Walk, a tour of your specimen trees and tree banks, your elms and native maples, your pin oaks and Japanese maples, and the crab apple plantings from which Eliza B. Wheaton made crab apple jelly.

Suddenly mouse in hand, I knew what I could say today. These trees, I thought, these trees are a metaphor, a metaphor for a good human community. Trees are alike in many ways. They all have survival needs: soil, water, sun. All human beings have survival needs: the soil of society, nourishment, care. Yet trees also differ in many ways. Some provide the keel for ships, others provide the fruit for jelly. All human beings also differ in many ways. We have dissimilar frailties, gifts, desires, and talents. I am no Jessye Norman, the singer. Nor am I Madonna, the millionaire and mother-in-waiting. Like vibrant natural ecologies, good human communities contain both the same and the different, the common and the diverse, the one and the many.

Your generation, I believe, is perceiving and experiencing human communities in ways that no other generation in history has done before. One well-known way is that you are the spinners of the world-wide web. You play with hypertext as easily as Michael Jordan does with a basketball. You meet and talk on-line. A second way in which you are history's pioneers is that you dwell with multiculturalism as an actual, daily reality. Nationally, you live with the sheer social and cultural diversity of the contemporary United States. Internationally, you are building a global village with pluralities of people, languages, streets, and neighbors. If the population of the world were figured as a village of 1000 people, there would not be 1000 mirror images. On the contrary, there would be 564 Asians, 210 Europeans, 86 Africans, 80 South Americans, and 60 North Americans.

How should we live with the actual, daily realities of our local and global multiculturalism? Some people cannot, will not, do not. They go on line to spew hatred against blacks, against Jews, against foreigners, again feminist women, against gays and lesbians---against any different human growth. However, for all of us, doing multiculturalism can be hard work--cognitively, socially, psychologically. It is much harder than adding a book or two to a college curriculum; much harder than reading a Benetton ad; much harder than getting the video of Dances With Wolves. For doing multiculturalism right demands that we embark upon a mission at once possible and impossible---the mission of nurturing freedom and mutual respect between men and women, among very different peoples. It is a great mission to nurture freedom and mutual respect as if they were at once winter wheat and summer flowers.

"Why should I bother?," a hard-boiled, hard-nosed cynic might ask. Where's the payoff, the cynic might go on, especially for all this soft mutual respect stuff? Especially in a global economy where people compete ferociously against each other for unevenly distributed resources? It is, of course, a realistic sign of your times that the cover of The New Yorker magazine on the week of your graduation pictures a group of college graduates unrolling their diplomas and discovering that the diplomas are help wanted ads.

There are payoffs for doing multiculturalism right. First, we are liberated from violent and wasteful prejudices. Next, we have more creative guides through the labyrinths of reality, more voices, more visions, more roots of beauty. Next, we have less selfish human communities and more friends. I am sure that you remember Charlotte's Web, a lovely, poignant text, an allegory of community. Charlotte is the smart old spider who saves the life of Wilbur, an anxious but sweet young pig, by weaving words about him into her webs. "Some pig," declares one web, "terrific" another, "radiant" still another, and "humble" still another. In a multispecied conversation, Wilbur asks Charlotte why she, a spider, has helped him, a pig. She responds, "You have been my friend...That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess...By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.''

Finally, perhaps most urgently, unless we learn how to do multiculturalism right, we will continue to suffer the battlefields on which we murder differences and the different; on which we kill and cast others down. We now watch with horror the blood of ethnic conflicts saturates the ground. "Live and let live" is an old adage. Its contemporary variant might well be, "We will not live unless we live and let live." Doing multiculturalism right means testing a non-violent survival technique: mutually assured survival.

In brief, you are newly aware of the possibilities, both good and bad, of human communities. Now you are about to leave this particular community, this campus, these trees, this creator of the website "http://www.wheatonma.edu." Your campus wants nothing but good for you. It hopes for good from you. Please remember this. And, as I end, I also ask you to remember me as a Charlotte who has spun some webs for and about you. In the center of one web is the word, "Terrific." In the center of another are the words, "Some class." Class of 1996, travel well.